St. Isaac's Cathedral

This guide to St. Isaac's Cathedral in Saint Petersburg follows Auguste de Montferrand, the young French architect who won Russia's biggest commission in 1818 after a fortune teller warned him that finishing the building would cost him his life. It traces the forty years of construction, from tens of thousands of pine piles driven into the swampy ground to the mercury-gilding of the dome that killed the workers who applied it. Listen for the stonecutters hauling single blocks of granite from Finland to form the colonnade.