The Hermitage Museum is one of the largest and oldest museums in the world, it was founded in 1764 by Catherine the Great and has been open to the public since 1852. We were fortunate to get to spend several hours there today, seeing a few highlights.
The Hermitage is so large that our guide estimated that only about 5-6% of their artwork and antiquities are displayed. They have some calculation that if you spent a minute at each item, it would take seven days a week for eight years to see everything!
I think we were expecting a plain old art museum, just big.....not so! We started the tour in the Winter Palace, which was the official residence of the Russian monarchy for almost two hundred years. It was absolutely beautiful!
The Viking folks arranged our "behind the scenes tour" before the museum opened to the general public, so we had more opportunities for pictures and questions. It was awesome. Our guide, Anna, was very knowledgeable and very personable, which helped....
The palace was built to look light and bright to make it more comfortable during the long Russian winters! And no offense to the palace at Versailles, but I think this one is more beautiful, seriously!
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