Winter Palace of Peter I

It was long assumed that Peter the Great's original Winter Palace, built by Mattarnovi and Trezzini and completed in 1720, had been completely destroyed to make way for the Hermitage Theatre, erected on the orders of Catherine the Great in 1782-1785. However, architectural research in the 1970s and 1980s revealed that, in designing the theatre, architect Giacomo Quarenghi had in fact retained much of the palace's structure, including several complete rooms, and that, beneath the theatre's stage, a significant portion of the old palace's courtyard was still intact.

After considerable renovation work, this enclosed fragment of the palace and its courtyard were opened to the public in 1992, and contain various items from the Hermitage collection directly related to Peter the Great, including his gilded carriage, and a waxwork of the Tsar by Bartolomeo Rastrelli created in 1725, as well as a variety of personal effects and paintings from his reign.