Interested in the high spirit of European knights, he gave shelter in Russia to the Order of Malta when its members lost their island to the troops of Napoleon.

After him the Castle was virtually neglected by the royal family of his eldest son and heir Alexander I of Russia and was used as a shared living space by some of the Imperial household until it was converted into a Military Engineering School whose cadets included the future writer Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Occupied then by various Soviet institutions like the Central Naval Library, now the Castle is part of Russian Museum,[3] has been repaired and holds national exhibitions of art connected with history of Russia.

On the right bank of Moyka across the Swan Canal from the Summer Garden lies a large open square named the Field of Mars after the Roman mythology god of war because in the late 18th and in 19th centuries it was used for Emperors' military parades of the regiments quartered in the city as the capital of the country.

After the February 1917 democratic revolution that destroyed the Russian autocracy, part of the field was used to bury the casualties of the revolutionary events, and in the Soviet times this part was made into the Monument to the Fighters of the Revolution, a memorial of granite slabs inscribed with dedications to the heroes by the Bolshevik Government Secretary for Education Anatoly Lunacharskiy, and a gas burner eternal flame was placed in the middle.

The Palace, built for Paul I's fourth son Grand Duke Mikhail, was later in the 19th century converted to the royal museum of the nation's art named after Alexander III with the nationwide ethnographic department.

The garden's western side with a decorative fence faces another waterway, a canal originally named after Catherine II who commissioned it, but after the 1917 revolution renamed in honour of the playwright Alexander Griboyedov.

This place of worship and now a museum was built in a traditional Russian style to mark the canalside spot on which Emperor Alexander II who had in 1861 abolished serfdom was on 1 March 1881, assassinated by terrorists from the Narodnaya Volya movement.

The Mikhailovsky Garden's western side is next to the Church of the Saviour on the Spilled Blood and a degree college named Higher School of Folk Arts[4] (crafts), originally founded by Empress Alexandra, the wife of Russia's last Emperor, and facing a waterway that starts here off Moyka - Griboyedov Canal, across which westwards there is a square formed chiefly by two buildings of the former Royal Mews and named after them together with two adjoining streets Konyushennaya.

The 18th-century estate of Count Razumovsky with its palace and outbuildings was converted towards the end of the century into a royal charity - an orphanage that for the first time in national history gave shelter to children born out of wedlock, whose mothers could anonymously leave them in a basket supervised by the gatekeeper.

Giving multilevel higher education at its colleges (faculties and institutes) grouped by school subjects and administrative spheres, in the 1990s it was recognised as having national importance.