If Moscow makes you work for it, St. Petersburg just hands itself over. I'd been warned it was "Russia's pretty one" and somehow that still undersold it. It's all canals and pastel palaces and bridges, built by a tsar who basically wanted his own Venice and got it. You only need a day to fall for it, though you'll leave wanting three. Here's how I'd spend the 24 hours.
Morning
Start with the canals
Start by just walking. St. Petersburg is a city of waterways , the Neva and then all these smaller canals threading through the middle and the nicest thing you can do first thing is wander along them before the city properly wakes up. The light off the water in the morning is gorgeous, and the streets are quiet enough to actually take it in.
Aim yourself loosely toward the centre. You'll cross little bridges, pass painted facades, and at some point the canal will bend and there it'll be.
The Church of the Spilled Blood
I lost it a bit here, not going to lie. The Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood is the swirly, candy-coloured, onion-domed one and yes, a bit like St. Basil's in Moscow, but slimmer and somehow even more theatrical, especially mirrored in the canal right in front of it. It's almost cartoonishly beautiful from outside.
Go in, though that's the part people skip and shouldn't. The entire inside, every surface, ceiling to floor, is covered in mosaic. Not painted, mosaic. Millions of tiny tiles. You walk in and just sort of stand there looking up with your mouth open.
The Hermitage
Then walk over to the Hermitage, in the mint-green-and-gold Winter Palace right on the Neva. It's one of the biggest art museums on earth and you could lose a week in it, so don't try to "do" it. Pick a couple of things the grand staircase, the throne room, a few of the big-name paintings and let yourself get a bit lost in the rooms themselves, which are half the spectacle. The building is as much the point as the art.
Buy your ticket online beforehand.
Afternoon
Lunch and a wander down Nevsky
Come up for air and get lunch. Same tip as Moscow: a Georgian spot is never a bad shout khinkali, khachapuri, a glass of red. Otherwise there are loads of cosy little places doing proper Russian food just off the main drag.
Then walk a stretch of Nevsky Prospekt, the big grand avenue running through the heart of the city. It's busy and a bit touristy, but it's beautiful - bookshops, old facades, the canals cutting across it, the odd street musician. Good for an aimless hour.
Down into the metro (I did it again)
So. I told myself I'd got the metro obsession out of my system in Moscow. I had not. St. Petersburg's metro is a different kind of stunning, and in some ways it got me even harder, because the stations here are some of the deepest in the world you go down these endlessly long escalators, way, way under the city, and you start wondering what on earth is waiting at the bottom. And then the doors open onto a palace. Again. How did they keep doing this?
The one I could not get over is Avtovo. Half the columns are clad in marble, fine, lovely but the other half are made of pressed glass, moulded with little patterns, lit from inside so the whole platform glows. It looks like a hall built out of cut crystal. People call it one of the most beautiful metro stations in the world and for once the internet isn't exaggerating.
Pushkinskaya is softer and grander, with a statue of the poet at the end and this gentle, golden, old-library feel to it. Kirovsky Zavod goes full austere-marble-temple. Narvskaya has these moody relief panels of workers and soldiers all down the platform.
It's the same plan as before: buy a single ticket, ride a few stops to the famous ones, gawp, take your photos, get back on. Even the escalators down are a bit of an experience. I'm not sorry I did it twice.
Evening
Dinner, slowly
Eat well and don't rush it. St. Petersburg has a genuinely good food scene now everything from clever modern Russian places to old grand dining rooms to tiny canal-side spots. Order some zakuski to start, the little cold plates and pickles and smoked fish, and settle in. A flight of flavoured vodkas won't hurt anyone.
The bridges (the real magic)
And then, if you're there in summer, you save the best for very late. Around 1am the bridges over the Neva open into half , its quite a sight, to let the ships through, one after another, and half the city comes out to watch. During the "white nights" those weeks around midsummer when it never properly gets dark the sky stays this strange glowing blue and the whole thing feels a little unreal. People are out on the embankments at 2am like it's the middle of the afternoon. If you only do one thing here, make it this.
A day in St. Petersburg is almost cruel, because you'll spend half of it planning the trip back. It's softer than Moscow, easier to love, and impossibly photogenic , the kind of place where you keep stopping mid-sentence because the light's just done something to a building. Go in summer if you can. Go anyway if you can't.