Perhaps St Petersburg's loveliest and oldest park. Tsar Peter the Great created the Summer Garden, surrounded by beautiful iron fences, in 1704. Most of the trees and all 250 statues were imported from Italy. For a century, it was the exclusive domain of people of the highest rank. Tsar Nicholas I opened it up to ‘well-dressed people’.
The modest, two-storey Summer Palace, in the northeastern corner of the park, was St Petersburg's first palace, built for Peter in 1704-14, and now open to the public. Little reliefs around the walls depict Russian naval victories, and many rooms contain early-18th-century furnishings.