Saınt Petersburg

Peter the Great wanted a window on Europe, so he cut one into a Baltic marsh, or that’s how Pushkin told it, and Saint Petersburg has been living up to the line ever since. Venice of the North, the Northern Capital, or simply Piter to the people who live here, it’s a city of canals and colonnades with its feet in Russia and its gaze turned west.

It’s also a city built to dazzle. You could spend eight hours a day in the Hermitage for fifteen years and still not see everything, so the saying goes, and the imperial palaces were built to impress foreign ambassadors, which can leave a first-time visitor feeling rather outnumbered.

VoiceMap’s self-guided audio tours bring the grandeur down to walking pace. Stroll Nevsky Prospect, pausing for a sugar-dusted pyshka before hearing how Kazan Cathedral spent Soviet times as a museum of atheism. Then head out to Peterhof, where the tsars’ trick fountains still ambush passers-by, and linger in the gardens for as long as they’ll keep you.