St. Petersburg
The incorrigible yet talented Christopher Hitchens has written a beautiful piece about St. Petersburg's history and nights. Link. Excerpts:
The city is so utterly classical, with its piazzas and canals and bridges and fortresses and cathedrals, that it doesn't seem possible for it to be younger than New York and Boston. Three centuries ago, these same banks of the Neva were swamp and marsh, with a few Finnish settlements and plenty of wildlife. Bears would have found it rough going. Only the granite determination of Peter the Great compelled the raising of a majestic city in such a remote and harsh setting (an adventure playground for all the architects and sculptors of his day), and now it's impossible to think about the modern world, let alone Russia, without it. Here is the city of Fabergé and Trotsky, of the Hermitage museum and the Finland Station, of Balanchine and Kirov, of Eisenstein and Shostakovich, of Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, and Nabokov. An apparent temple of civilization: the polished window between Russia and Europe, it has been the scene of near-continuous murder, massacre, assassination, terror, famine, and war. There isn't a boulevard or square that hasn't been the witness to events that harrow up the soul and freeze the blood. . .
The original White Nights were part of the reason I was there. In midsummer, and especially at the June solstice, the sun over St. Petersburg refuses to set. At about midnight, an eerie luminosity deposes the reign of night or day: the resulting silvered penumbra features hauntingly in the painting and photography and literature of the place. Because of the prevalence of water and the multicolor of the buildings–typically painted in pastel green, pink, blue, and yellow–a sort of trance descends over the retina. Best of all is to absorb it from a riverboat, slipping along the river or through the backwaters. Alexander Pushkin's famous poem "The Bronze Horseman," which is ostensibly about the massive, rearing statue of Peter the Great, becomes entwined with the city's "limpid twilight's moonless shine" and the golden cloudland of the light, for soon one dawn succeeds another with barely half an hour of night.
