These photos were taken during our trip to the famous Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. We stayed for 2 days in the bay area to celebrate our 4th wedding Anniversary. We visited the Marina, the Exploratorium, and the Palace of Fine Arts. It was a great anniversary treat for us.


The Palace of Fine Arts has been a favorite wedding location for couples throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. A renovation restoring the interior of the dome, the walkways around the Palace and a seismic retrofit was completed in early 2009. The lagoon was intended to echo those found in classical settings in Europe, where the expanse of water provides a mirror surface to reflect the grand buildings and an undisturbed vista to appreciate them from a distance.

The dome of the Palace of Fine Arts just outside the Exploratorium and the adjacent lagoon have often been used as backdrops for movies, such as Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. One of the more recent sequences takes place in The Rock, where FBI agent Stanley Goodspeed (Nicolas Cage) finally catches up with John Mason (Sean Connery).