Hermitage

The State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg is one of the largest art museums in the world, occupying six interconnected buildings along the Neva embankment, the most famous of which is the Winter Palace. Catherine the Great began the collection in 1764, and what followed over the next 250 years was acquisition on a scale that most Western museums can only stare at: around 3 million objects total, roughly 70,000 of which are on display at any one time.

The Scale Problem

A complete tour of every gallery would cover about 22 kilometres. Nobody does that. The museum requires a plan.

The headline rooms are the Jordan Staircase (the baroque entrance staircase with malachite columns and gilded everything), the Malachite Room (the former drawing room of the Imperial family, with two tonnes of malachite used for column facings and table tops), and the Pavilion Hall with its mosaic floor and 28 chandeliers.

The art collection’s strongest sections are Italian Renaissance (Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, including the Loggia of Raphael, a commissioned replica of the Vatican originals), Flemish and Dutch Masters (Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck), and French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism (Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse). The Impressionist and Modern galleries on the third floor of the Winter Palace are underappreciated partly because people exhaust themselves on the State Rooms below.

Tickets and Getting In

Online booking through hermitagemuseum.org is essential from June through September. Walk-up queues outside the main entrance on Palace Square can run 1.5-2 hours on peak summer days. Adult entry is around 700 RUB (prices change; verify closer to travel). The first Thursday of each month has free entry, which means extreme crowds.

The museum opens at 10:00, closes at 18:00 (21:00 on Wednesdays and Fridays). Allow a full day for anything approaching a comprehensive visit, or two focused half-days if you’re covering specific collections.

What Surrounds the Hermitage

Palace Square (Dvortsovaya Ploshchad) in front of the Winter Palace is one of the great urban spaces in Europe. The Alexander Column in the centre, granite monolith standing 47.5 metres, was raised in 1834 and is balanced purely by its own weight. The General Staff Building across the square has been partially converted into a modern art wing of the Hermitage.

The Bronze Horseman (Falconet’s equestrian statue of Peter I, 1782) is a 20-minute walk south along the Neva. St Isaac’s Cathedral, the largest Orthodox church in Russia, is 5 minutes’ walk from the Hermitage; its gilded dome is visible across the city.

Eating Near the Museum

The museum café inside the main building is functional but not special. Better options are a short walk: Teplo (warm and good for lunch, Russian home cooking), or Il Lago near St Isaac’s for something more formal. The Nevsky Prospekt, 10 minutes’ walk east, has every price point from Pyshechnaya (Soviet-era doughnut café, 30 RUB per doughnut) to upmarket Georgian restaurants.

For accommodation, the hotels immediately around Palace Square (Four Seasons Lion Palace, Astoria) are very expensive. The area around Nevsky Prospekt, a 10-15 minute walk, has a much wider range: Rossi Hotel and Hotel Helvetia sit in the mid-market and are consistently well-reviewed.