Mikhailovsky Garden

This guide to Mikhailovsky Garden in Saint Petersburg turns on the first of March 1881, when a bomb landed on the canal embankment along the garden's eastern fence as Emperor Alexander the Second, the tsar who had freed Russia's serfs, rode past in his carriage. He stepped out shaken but unhurt, tended to the wounded, and lingered to confront the young revolutionary who had thrown it. It traces the garden's quieter history too, laid out generations earlier by architect Carlo Rossi as pleasure grounds for a grand duke. Walk toward the fence along the canal, on the garden's eastern edge.