Hermitage Museum St Petersburg

The State Hermitage Museum is the second-largest museum in the world. The museum starts its history from collections of works of art which were gained by Russian empress Catherine II in private capacity. With over 3 million items in its collection, it also definitely rewards repeat visits, and new-comers can only hope to get a brief taste of the riches on offer here, from Impressionist masterpieces to fascinating Oriental treasures. One estimate has it that you would need eleven years to view each exhibit on display for just one minute, so many visitors prefer to organize a guided tour to ensure they have time to catch all the collection’s highlights. Art aficionados, however, may find it more rewarding to seek out for themselves the works that they are particularly interested in.
In the Main Museum Complex of the State Hermitage are presented the monuments of culture and arts of the ancient world, Europe, Russia, the East, archaeological and numismatic collections. In the Hermitage collection there are two paintings by Leonardo da Vinci and sculpture by Michelangelo, which can be found nowhere else in Russia, as well as the largest collection of Rembrandt’s paintings outside Netherlands.