Full-day tour of the State Hermitage Museum

One of the largest museums in the world, with over three million individual objects in its collections, the Hermitage can easily fill a whole day's sightseeing and, with the sheer volume of work on display, the somewhat haphazard distribution of departments, and the size of crowds during the high tourist season, your day can be much enhanced with the services of a good-quality tour guide.

This full-day Hermitage tour is divided into two parts. The first part of the day (around two hours) will be spent in the General Staff Building, which houses the perennially popular works of the French impressionists and post-impressionists, among them masterpieces by Monet, Cezanne, Gauguin, Picasso and Matisse. There are also exhibitions of applied art from the same period, including numerous Art Nouveau gems, and of the Hermitage's increasingly impressive collections of Soviet and contemporary Russian art. Here the services of a guide can be particularly useful in introducing and contextualizing this body of work little known outside Russia.

You will then break for lunch either at one of the Hermitage cafes or a nearby eatery of your choice (your guide can provide recommendations) before heading to the Winter Palace itself. In the company of a guide, you can bypass the queues and head straight for the spectacular Winter Palace state rooms. Here your guide will have the chance to present a history of the Winter Palace and the Hermitage buildings, as well of the generations of the Romanov Imperial family that lived there.

You then proceed to viewing the masterpieces of Western European art up to the 19th century (including works by Michaelangelo, Rembrandt, Rubens, Poussin and Caravaggio) before stepping further back in time to enjoy the Hermitage's diverse and stunning antiquities collections. This full day tour gives you enough time to also explore the priceless works from the Bronze Age up to the early 20th century kept in the Hermitage's Treasure Gallery, and the beautifully displayed collections of Archaeological Artifacts from Siberia and Eastern Europe, one of the least known but most fascinating sections of the museum. This itinerary will take up the full day, but if there are other parts of the Hermitage collections that you would prefer to see you can arrange this with your guide during the lunch break, or by emailing us in advance once you've booked your tour.

Itinerary and route details