Nevsky Prospect

Nevsky Avenue is the main street in the city and one of the best-known streets in Russia. Planned by Peter the Great as beginning of the road to Novgorod and Moscow, the avenue runs the historical center of the city, it runs from the Admiralty to the Moscow Railway Station and then, after a slight kink, to the Alexander Nevsky Lavra. In the very first days of St. Petersburg it quickly became adorned with beautiful buildings, squares and bridges and became the very center of the bustling, rapidly growing city.

The chief sights include the Rastrelliesque Stroganov Palace, the huge neoclassical Kazan Cathedral, the Art Nouveau Bookhouse (Dom Knigi), Elisseeff Emporium, half a dozen 18th-century churches, a monument to Catherine the Great, an enormous 18th-century shopping mall, a mid-19th-century department store, the Russian National Library, and the Anichkov Bridge with its horse statues. The feverish life of the avenue was described by Nikolai Gogol in his story "Nevsky Prospekt". Fyodor Dostoevsky often employed the Nevksy Prospekt as a setting within his works, such as Crime and Punishment and The Double: A Petersburg Poem.

Nevsky Prospect is also the city’s central shopping street and the hub of the city’s entertainment and nightlife.