圣·彼得堡 is Saint Petersburg, Peter the Great's 'window to Europe' founded in 1703 on the Neva delta. Russian capital from 1712 until 1918, renamed Petrograd (
彼得格勒) in 1914 and Leningrad (
列宁格勒) under the Soviets, restored to St. Petersburg in 1991. The middle dot · is standard in Chinese for hyphenated/compound foreign place names.
