ABSTRACT
The city of Saint Petersburg is one of the most ambitious and, at the same time, most problematic designs of a single human mind: Peter the Great conceived of a city that would become his capital and the symbol of his re-conceptualized state, renewed and oriented towards the West. Spurred on by this ambition, Peter chose for the city a locale unfortunate both in its position in relation to the rest of the country and in its geo-climatic features. As if the brutal climate that allegedly inspired the most poignant pages of the great Russian literature to follow were not enough, the city was constantly inundated by the waters of the Gulf of Finland. The image and history of Saint Petersburg are inalienable from the waters that embrace it and run through it.
