Summer Garden

The Summer Garden is Saint Petersburg's oldest park, laid out from 1704 on the orders of Peter the Great at the point where the Fontanka River meets the Neva in the city's Central District. Formal allees of trees frame more than 90 surviving 18th-century marble statues, many of them Italian originals depicting allegorical and mythological figures, alongside period fountains that have been restored to working order in recent decades after being dismantled for much of the Soviet period. The small Summer Palace of Peter I, a modest two-story stone building near the Fontanka entrance, was the tsar's original summer residence and remains inside the park grounds as a separate paid attraction with a small collection of period rooms. A walk through the garden's main allees and along the Swan Canal, which divides the park along its length, comfortably fits into an hour to ninety minutes, making it an easy stop between the Field of Mars and the Fontanka embankment. The wrought-iron railing along the Neva side, completed in the 1780s, is itself a well-known landmark and a popular photo backdrop, especially with the river and Peter and Paul Fortress spire visible beyond it. Early mornings bring soft light through the tree canopy and few other visitors, while golden-hour evenings in late spring and summer draw local residents for walks alongside tourists, giving the garden a livelier atmosphere without feeling overcrowded. The garden closes for maintenance each April, when the marble statues are boxed up for winter protection and unboxed for the new season, so an April visit finds the sculptures unavailable to see.