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The Hermitage (Ermitazh; Tues-Sat 10.30am-6pm, Sun 10.30am-5pm; www.hermitagemuseum.org ; $6) is one of the world's great art museums. Of awesome size and diversity, it embraces everything from ancient Scythian gold and Kyoto woodcuts to Cubism. It has been calculated that merely to glance at each of the 2.8 million objects it houses would take nine years and would entail walking a distance of more than 10km. In the magnificent state rooms of the Winter Palace itself the tsars once held court and the Provisional Government was arrested by the Bolsheviks. The Italian art section has works by Leonardo, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Veronese and Tiepolo; the Dutch and Flemish art collection features magnificent selections of paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens and Van Dyck; and there is an impressive collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French art . After the state rooms and the Gold Collection, the most universally popular section of the Hermitage is that covering modern European art from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a fine spread of Impressionist paintings and works by Matisse and Picasso. Look out, too, for the work of Rodin, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Henri Rousseau, Delacroix, Cezanne, Pissarro, Monet, Degas and Renoir. Paintings by Bonnard and Denis are on display in the museum annexe housed in the majestically curving General Staff Building on the other side of Palace Square, along with exhibits tracing the glory of Imperial Russia and its elite military forces.
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