In 1769 an elderly Italian gentleman, "homesick" for Russia, returned to St Petersburg to look at the buildings which reminded him of his youth.
He was Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli and, as the imperial architect, he had designed many of them.
The Winter Palace, the Catherine Palace, the Smolny Cathedral and the Stroganov Palace all bear his unique baroque style.
The son of the famous sculptor Carlo Rastrelli, Bartolomeo Rastrelli began to study architecture in the 1720s and spent five years in Italy to continue his architectural studies there.
Within a couple of years of his return to Russia as a highly skilled architect, he became the chief architect at the imperial court where his first important project was the building of the Winter Palace for Tsarina Anna Ioannovna.
The palace was rather modest in comparison with the one you see now on Palace Square, and to build it the empress had to buy up the adjoining houses belonging to two noblemen.
In the 1730s he designed two palaces in Curlandia (Latvia) for Ernest Biron -- the most influential courtier in Tsarina Anna's court -- before the architect went to Moscow to design the Annenhof Palace and learn the traditional techniques of Slavic church architecture.
Rastrelli, who was made a Count, was a real innovator when it came to designing churches and chapels. He combined the features of European baroque with the features of Slavic churches built before the time of Peter the Great.
One of his most brilliant works was the Smolny Convent, with its magnificent Cathedral of the Resurrection, which the Empress Elizabeth commissioned but died before she saw its completion.
But the palaces he designed for the empress during the 1740s and 1750s were more famous than his churches. By this time Rastrelli was a very rich man. He lived in a luxurious house in the center of St Petersburg near most of the buildings he himself had designed.
Empress Elizabeth I did not like the palace and so asked him to design a new one to be built on the same spot. The design was ready by 1754 and the following year work started and the empress was moved into a temporary wooden palace on Nevsky Prospect.
She never lived to see her Winter palace completed. Instead, her nephew Tsar Peter III moved into the new palace on April 5, 1762 together with his beautiful wife -- the future Catherine the Great.
The new Winter Palace -- the one that exists today -- was the biggest building in St Petersburg with the total length of its facade spanning 2 km. This luxuriously decorated baroque building is considered one of the most beautiful in the world.
All Rastrelli's talent and experience were embodied in this magnificent palace and few palaces in Europe could compete with it.
For Rastrelli, quite an elderly man by this time, it was hard to supervise the construction of the palace. The architect spent a lot of time at the construction site to see that everything was according to his design. It was then he fell seriously ill.
He asked the tsar to give him a year's leave so that he could have a thorough medical checkup in Italy where the climate and doctors helped him to recover. Within a year he returned to Russia.
Rastrelli found it difficult to continue working as the chief architect of the imperial court. He was getting old and tired and besides, he realized baroque architecture was going out of fashion and was being replaced by neo-classicism.
He also felt the Winter Palace had been his "swan song" and that he was unable to design anything better. Soon after his return from Italy he asked the new Empress Catherine the Great to allow him to retire.
In 1764 Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli, together with his family, left his luxurious house in St Petersburg and moved to Curlandia. He lived there in the quiet atmosphere of his home, resting after many years of hard work. But the peaceful atmosphere of his Curlandian life was shattered by the illness of his beloved wife who died in 1767. He realized that he felt lonely and unhappy in that foreign country which he could never get used to.
In 1769 he returned and two years later in 1771 was awarded the title of Honored Member of the Russian Academy of Arts. A few months later, the great architect died.
But despite everything that has happened in Russia over more than 200 years, Rastrelli, or Varfolomeo Varfolomeyevich as he was called, is still remembered and leaves an impressive legacy for us all to enjoy behind him.