Alexander Column

This guide to the Alexander Column on Palace Square in Saint Petersburg follows the raising of a six-hundred-ton shaft of red granite in 1832, quarried in Finland and set upright on its own weight with no mortar or bolts. For years, people crossed the square in wide loops rather than walk beneath it, certain it would fall. The architect, Auguste de Montferrand, walked his dog in slow laps around the base every evening, until the day he died.