By Hrituraj Mishra Some cities hand you their landmarks on the first afternoon. Others take a few days and then quietly let you in. St. Petersburg is the second kind. I arrived as a first time international traveller from India, which meant everything was working on me at once: the imperial facades, the wide clean roads, the canals cutting through the middle of it all. The impression was immediate: a city built over centuries and still very much lived in. My first real look at it came from outside the Angleterre Hotel, where we stayed for the first half of the trip, with St. Isaac’s Cathedral standing right across from the entrance. Step out of the door and the city is simply there. Supermarkets, restaurants, public squares, half a dozen landmarks, all close enough to reach on foot.September helped. Coming from India, the coolness was a relief rather than a problem, and although it rained on and off, I could stay outdoors for hours without thinking about it. Walking around, the city kept reminding me of other places: Paris in the facades, Vienna in the grandeur, Venice in the way the water is threaded through everything, and yet it never stopped feeling completely Russian. But architecture alone doesn’t explain St. Petersburg. The city turns up in palaces and cathedrals, in museums and concert halls, on a boat at midnight, at a restaurant table, and in a two minute conversation with someone who doesn’t speak your language. I was travelling with journalists, bloggers, influencers and tourism and business representatives from several countries, so I met the city not only as a visitor but through everyone else’s reactions to it as well. Peterhof: water, gold and a very old piece of engineering If you want the imperial version of St. Petersburg in one visit, Peterhof is it. The former summer residence of the tsars sits outside the city and pulls palaces, gardens, fountains and waterways into a single landscape that feels designed for spectacle as much as for living in. Peter the Great founded it in the early eighteenth century, with construction of the residence beginning in 1714. The Grand Palace, the Upper Garden and the Lower Park grew into an ensemble modelled on the great European royal residences, formally opened in 1723 and expanded by the rulers who followed.What catches your eye first is how the palace, gardens and fountains are locked together. The Grand Cascade sits at the centre of it, running down towards the Sea Canal and the Gulf of Finland. There are now more than 150 fountains and four major cascades across the parks, and most of the system still works on gravity rather than pumps. The drop between the water sources and the fountains creates all the pressure it needs. A three hundred year old idea, still performing every morning. Walking the grounds, it becomes obvious this was never meant to be just a palace. The avenues, sculptures and fountains are arranged so that a new view opens every few steps. The Lower Park alone covers more than 100 hectares and holds around 150 fountains, which is the kind of scale photographs flatten completely. For an Indian traveller seeing a European imperial landscape for the first time, the point isn’t ticking off a famous name. It’s watching how architecture, water, sculpture and landscape were made to work as one environment.There’s a harder story underneath the gold, too. Peterhof was badly damaged during the Second World War, including its parks and fountain system. Restoration began after the area was liberated, and bringing the fountains back was central to bringing the whole ensemble back. What you walk through today isn’t only a preserved residence. It is decades of rebuilding. History in the middle of the modern cityBack in the centre, that same history stops being a day trip and becomes the street you’re standing on.Palace Square was the first place that stopped me. The Winter Palace on one side, the long curve of the General Staff Building on the other, the Alexander Column holding the centre. You cannot take it in with one look. The square came together over nearly nine decades and went on to host some of the defining moments of Russian history, including the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. The Winter Palace is now the main building of the State Hermitage Museum, founded by Catherine the Great in 1764 and today holding millions of objects across periods and cultures. The present palace took shape in the eighteenth century under the architect Bartolomeo Rastrelli, survived fire, revolution and war, and its interiors were brought back through successive restoration campaigns. The thing I kept noticing was how the landmarks refuse to stand alone. Palace Square, the Admiralty, St. Isaac’s and the embankments along the Neva read as one continuous stretch of architecture rather than separate attractions.There’s something familiar in that, oddly. In India, historic cities tell their stories through forts, temples, old quarters and palaces layered across eras. Here it’s enormous squares, monumental avenues and a river. The vocabulary is different; the habit of carrying history in the architecture is not. What stayed with me most wasn’t any single monument but the walking between them: a palace square to the river, an ornate cathedral to a quiet embankment, a busy street into an empty architectural corner, all in ten minutes. Where the city actually startedThe Peter and Paul Fortress, on Zayachy Island at the mouth of the Neva, is where St. Petersburg begins. Peter the Great founded it on 27 May 1703, the date the city still counts as its birthday. Its landmark is the Peter and Paul Cathedral, whose golden spire has become shorthand for the whole city, and which holds the graves of most of the Romanov emperors and empresses. What I found interesting is how little it stayed a fortress. Over the centuries the complex took in military facilities, government buildings and a prison for political detainees. Today it works as a museum complex