State Hermitage Museum

The State Hermitage is one of the largest museums in the world, and it began as the private picture collection of Catherine the Great, who bought paintings by the hundred from 1764 onward and built a series of pavilions beside the Winter Palace to hold them. Today the museum occupies the Winter Palace itself, the green and white baroque residence of the tsars on the bank of the Neva, together with the Small Hermitage, the Old Hermitage, the New Hermitage and the Hermitage Theatre, a chain of five linked buildings. Across Palace Square, the east wing of the General Staff Building holds the Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and modern collections.

The collection numbers more than three million items, and the rooms themselves are half the reason to come: gilded state halls, malachite and jasper, parquet floors of rare woods, and the great Jordan Staircase that ambassadors once climbed. Antiquity, the Italian Renaissance, Dutch and Flemish painting, Spanish and French schools, Russian court life, Siberian archaeology and the arts of the East each fill whole suites of rooms.

A first visit should be modest. Choose a route through the state rooms and the Italian and Dutch galleries, see the Peacock Clock and the Rembrandts, and save the General Staff Building with its Matisse and Picasso for a separate half day. Rooms are numbered on maps and on door frames, and the numbers are the easiest way to find your way.