Summer Garden

This guide to the Summer Garden in Saint Petersburg follows a marble Venus dug from Roman soil after nearly two thousand years underground, and the deal Tsar Peter the Great's envoy struck to bring her here around 1720. You'll hear how Peter displayed her as the first classical nude most Russians had ever seen, and the scandal that greeted a naked goddess in Orthodox Petersburg. A soldier was posted beside her day and night, under orders that treated a statue like a fortress.