The Gold Hall
The throne room under gilded stucco.
Arian Zwegers — CC BY 2.0 · Ralf Roletschek — CC BY-SA 3.0 at · Jelena Maksimova — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Jeroen Komen from Utrecht, Netherlands — CC BY-SA 2.0
A small state in what is now western Latvia (1561-1795), nominally under Poland and surprisingly rich — it owned a fleet and two colonies, in Gambia and Tobago, which is what paid for a palace on this scale.
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"Latvia's Versailles", built by the architect of the Winter Palace: Bartolomeo Rastrelli — the Italian who built St Petersburg's Winter Palace — designed Rundāle between 1736 and 1768 as the summer seat of the Duke of Courland, producing pure Baroque-Rococo with a hundred and thirty-eight rooms in the middle of a flat farming plain with nothing else in it. The ceremonial halls were restored over fifty years with exceptional precision: the Gold Hall for the throne under gilded stucco, the White Hall for dancing with its plant-form plasterwork, the long gallery, and the duke's and duchess's rooms with their furniture, tapestries and ceramic stoves — most of the restoration done by local hands, after the palace had served as a grain store and a school under Soviet rule. The French garden behind covers ten hectares: hedge mazes, rose parterres (some thirty thousand rose bushes, peaking in June and July) and fountains — laid out from Rastrelli's original plans. An hour south of Riga by car.
The throne room under gilded stucco.
Ten hectares from Rastrelli's original plans.
From Soviet grain store to a complete palace.
Pilsrundāle, Latvia