Palace Embankment
Granite riverside promenade lined with imperial palaces, built to tame a river prone to catastrophic floods.
This guide to Palace Embankment in Saint Petersburg opens with a catastrophe: the flood of November 1824, when the Neva rose more than thirteen feet, drowned neighborhoods, and later inspired Pushkin to write of a bronze tsar watching his ruined city from horseback. It reaches back more than sixty years earlier, to Catherine the Great ordering architect Yury Felten to armor the rotting riverbank in granite hauled from islands off the Finnish coast. Look along the water at the row of palaces built beside this stretch of granite, the Winter Palace, the Hermitage, and the Marble Palace among them.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.