Palace Square

This guide to Palace Square in Saint Petersburg centers on August 30th, 1832, when three thousand men gripped ropes to raise a six-hundred-ton block of red granite upright in under two hours, with nothing to hold it to its pedestal but its own weight. It follows Auguste de Montferrand's gamble on the math, and the two years before the column was unveiled with its bronze angel. Listen for whose face that angel was carved to resemble.