St Petersburg has been dubbed the Venice of the North for its palace-lined waterways. It managed to escape the architectural incursions of Stalinism and its grandiose relics of tsarist days are largely intact. Sculpted by islands and the sinuous Neva River, the city is a vista of geometric elegance.

Within this geometry is a dust-devil of influences and styles and a bewitching vortex of life's extremes. It's breathtakingly gorgeous, it's ruefully falling apart; it's viscerally sensual, it's crude and vulgar; its very essence gets under your skin, but remains forever outside your grasp.