"I feel like I'm in Italy!" the elegant young woman a few yards away from me breathlessly exclaimed.
Surprisingly, she was not speaking at a city fashion parade nor complaining after a near-miss on the city's dangerous streets.
The woman was standing on the balcony of the 1,000-square-meter exhibition hall of St Petersburg's Museum of Applied, Decorative and Industrial Art -- a magnificent, palazzo-style creation with an exquisitely intricate staircase.
Museum visitors are as likely to be captivated by the building's interior as they are by the exhibits displayed within.
There are museums and palaces here with extraordinarily beautiful, imitation Italian interiors. These are often so baroque that their sheer effrontery confronts viewers with their derivative nature at the same time that they awe them into silent wonder.
Here, the effect is coolly, simply and precisely Italian.
The museum itself houses several elaborately decorated galleries that create delightful honeycombed layers of color -- the icing on the museum's visual cake.
It shares an entrance with the school. On entering proceed up the white staircase in front of you, then turn right. A doorway ahead leads to a staircase on the left going down to the museum proper.
But first you must turn right to the charming red passage with a graceful spiral staircase and a white statue of a youthful Pushkin reclining on a bench -- it leads to the gallery level of the exhibition hall.
Heading downstairs to the museum itself you are brought back into the 20th century with a Soviet jolt.
Facing you at the foot of the stairs is a stained glass window of "proletarian artists and designers" -- serious, nobly-proportioned youths creating workers' art.
To your right is a large ceramic cameo of Chkalovsk -- Soviet hero and the first man to fly non-stop over the North Pole.
To your left is the museum and more breathtaking Italianate architecture.
The museum's exhibits include a wide selection of the practical and the beautiful, including the intriguing and delightful Moscow "marriage" mirrors.
Dating to the 17th century and made from expensive Venetian glass framed by local craftsman, these were considered an important part of the marriage ceremony in many parts of Russia in the 17th century.
The mirror's elaborate box-frame folds out, creating a semi-enclosed space. The bride and groom would press their faces close together, smile and gaze into the mirror at the "happiest moment of their lives" -- committing it to memory.
Pre-camera era wedding photos!
There is also a section recreating the Russian Terem, the upper story in a medieval Russian home where the household's womenfolk lived in seclusion.
If you could afford a two-story house then you hid your women away and almost nobody else ever saw them.
Peter the Great (1672-1725) sounded the Terem's death knell with his Western reforms -- though not before banishing his rebellious and talented sister to a nunnery.
Other highlights are Russian and German woodwork and a display of dolls dressed in traditional costumes from the regions of Russia and the former USSR.