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Culture and heritage · Russia
The Hermitage and the Winter Palace
One of the world's largest museums, in the tsars' Winter Palace on the Neva. We plan a route through the key halls with a private guide and booked entry.
St Petersburg · Russia
The experience
Catherine the Great founded the Hermitage in 1764, when she bought a collection of European paintings and hung them in her palace. Today the museum fills the Winter Palace and neighbouring buildings on the Neva embankment and holds millions of works and objects.
Inside the Winter Palace you see the tsars' state rooms: the marble Jordan Staircase, the green Malachite Room, the great Throne Room and the gilded Peacock Clock, which still works. You then move on to the European galleries, with works by Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt and many others.
The museum is too large to see in a day, so we plan a route of three to four hours through the highlights, which can be shaped for children or for art lovers. We book a timed entry so you avoid the summer queues.
Afterwards you walk across Palace Square, past the General Staff Building and the Alexander Column, to the Neva pier where the hydrofoils leave for Peterhof.
Russia
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