Rundāle Palace

The standard reference point for Bartolomeo Rastrelli is St. Petersburg: the Winter Palace on the Neva embankment, the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoye Selo, the Smolny Cathedral. These are the buildings that established his reputation as the definitive architect of 18th-century Russian Baroque, the designer who gave the imperial city its characteristic silhouette of pastel facades, white columns, gilded domes, and elaborately decorated interiors. Rundāle Palace, in rural Latvia approximately 75 kilometres south of Riga, belongs to the same creative output — designed by the same architect for the same patron culture, built in two phases between 1736 and 1768 — and it contains in one building the entire arc of Rastrelli's mature style, from his Baroque structural phase to the lighter Rococo decorative idiom he developed in his final major commissions.

The patron was Ernst Johann von Biron, and understanding the palace requires understanding its owner. Biron was a Baltic German of modest provincial origins who rose, through personal proximity to the Empress Anna of Russia, to become the most powerful man in the Russian Empire during her reign from 1730 to 1740. His influence was comprehensive enough that the period was later called the Bironovshchina — Biron's time — by Russian historians who viewed his decade of dominance as a foreign imposition on Russian affairs. When Anna died in 1740, Biron served briefly as regent for the infant Ivan VI before being arrested, tried, and exiled to Siberia in a palace coup. The palace he had commissioned at Rundāle, begun in 1736, was left half-finished.

The story doesn't end there. Biron was eventually rehabilitated under Catherine the Great, restored to his Duchy of Courland, and at the age of approximately 80 commissioned Rastrelli to complete the palace interior he had been forced to abandon four decades earlier. The result is the building visitors see today: a structural shell built in the earlier Baroque phase, filled with Rococo decorative interiors executed in the 1760s by Rastrelli and a team of craftsmen that included the German stucco artist Johann Michael Graff. The combination of the two phases — structural Baroque wrapped around Rococo interior ornament — is visible throughout, and it gives Rundāle a layered quality that neither pure Baroque nor pure Rococo palaces possess.

The 138 restored rooms include staterooms of genuine quality. The Gold Hall, the principal ceremonial room, has a painted ceiling and gilded stucco ornament in the full Rococo tradition — the scrolling acanthus, the asymmetrical cartouches, the soft palette of white, gold, and grey that distinguishes Rococo from the heavier polychrome of the Baroque. The White Hall, the ballroom, is arguably the finest room in the palace: two storeys of white stucco relief with no gilding, relying entirely on the modelling of the surface to create depth and movement in a way that photographs consistently undersell. The Duke's bedroom, the Grand Gallery, and the formal reception rooms complete the principal circuit and collectively represent the most complete survival of 18th-century high-court interior design in the Baltic states.

The formal gardens occupy 10 hectares to the south of the palace. Laid out on French parterre principles — geometric beds, clipped hedges, gravel paths radiating from central axial views — they were restored from the 1970s onward as part of the same restoration programme that reclaimed the palace itself. The rose garden, planted with approximately 2,300 roses in parterre patterns, is the gardens' most visited element and is at its best in June and early July. The restoration of the gardens, like the restoration of the palace interiors, involved reconstructing from historical drawings and written records what the Soviet era had eliminated through neglect and agricultural repurposing.

The palace's history between its completion and its restoration is a story worth telling because it illuminates how close the building came to being lost entirely. After Biron's death in 1772 and the absorption of Courland into the Russian Empire in 1795, the palace passed through various owners and deteriorated steadily. The Second World War brought damage and looting. Soviet collectivisation converted the palace into a granary — grain was stored in the staterooms, machinery operated where Rococo stucco survived on the walls and ceilings — and subsequently into a school. The restoration, begun in 1972 under architect Imants Lancmanis and continuing for over four decades, replaced damaged and missing stucco by hand using 18th-century lime-based techniques, matching surviving fragments to establish the original patterns. The work was completed to the current state only in the 2010s. Rundāle today is considered the best-preserved Baroque palace in the Baltic states, and the restoration is itself regarded as one of the landmark conservation achievements of post-Soviet Eastern Europe.

For visitors from Riga, the most efficient approach is the GYG day trip (t1274993, from $124), which bundles Rundāle with Bauska Castle — a ruined medieval fortress 12 kilometres away, at the confluence of the Mūsa and Mēmele rivers — and the Hill of Crosses near Šiauliai in northern Lithuania, a UNESCO-recognised pilgrimage site where hundreds of thousands of crosses of all sizes have been planted over generations of Catholic devotion and national resistance, most recently during the Soviet occupation. The 7–9 hour itinerary is efficient: Bauska is an easy half-hour walk and a natural appetite-opener before the more demanding palace visit, and the Hill of Crosses is both visually extraordinary and emotionally weighted in a way that provides counterpoint to Rundāle's aristocratic splendour.

For visitors who prefer to drive, Baudras and Rundāle are 75 kilometres from Riga on the A7 motorway — a drive of just over an hour in normal traffic. Bauska is the natural lunch stop; the town has cafés and a good relationship with tourists who have come for the palace. The palace itself is open year-round, with longer summer hours.

Sigulda Castle and Turaida Castle, both already on this site, represent Latvia's other essential castle circuit — but they sit northeast of Riga in the Gauja National Park valley, roughly the opposite direction from Rundāle. The two areas are not realistic same-day pairings from Riga; they are better understood as separate itinerary choices covering different facets of Latvian heritage: medieval fortifications in the Gauja valley versus the 18th-century Baroque court culture of the Zemgale plains.