St Petersburg Travel Guide

Museums & Galleries

State Hermitage/Winter Palace: features over three million works of art from the likes of Leonardo da Vinci, Peter Paul Rubens, Pablo Picasso and Vincent Van Gogh. Essentially, anyone who is anyone in the art world over the past 800 years is displayed here.

The museum also contains an array of other artefacts from sculpture to European armaments; and the buildings themselves, including the Winter Palace, are as magnificent as the millions of pieces they house.

Russian Museum: the world’s largest museum of Russian artefacts houses an excellent collection that has now been going for more than a century. The displays are now so vast that they are housed at four separate locations, the main exhibition hall being the Mikhailovsky Palace and the Benois Building along with Mikhailovsky Castle, the Marble Palace and the Stroganov Palace.
Old city centre. Open: 10:00 to 18:00, Wed to Mon. Closed Tue.

Central Navy Museum: originally built between 1805 and 1810 to house the stock exchange, this impressive collection of naval artefacts is one of the oldest in St Petersburg. Displays include the boat of Tsar Peter the Great, the founder of the city, which he used while learning to sail as a teenager at the end of the 17th century. This is just one of over 800,000 exhibits on display here.
Birzhevaya Ploschad 4. Open: 10:30 to 16:45, Wed to Sun. Closed Mon, Tue and the last Thu of the month.

Academy of Fine Arts Museum: overlooking the Neva river, the Academy of Fine Arts has hosted many prominent Russian artists. The collection focuses on upcoming Russian talent based here, old and new, dating back to 1757; and it also houses temporary exhibitions.
Universitetskaya Naberezhnaya 17. Open: 11:00 to 19:00, Wed to Sun. Closed Mon and Tue.

Arctic and Antarctic Museum: follows the fortunes of 200 years of Russian Arctic and Antarctic expeditions, including the Chelyuskin rescue operation of 1934 and the first Russian Antarctic expedition between 1819 and 1821.
Ulitsa Marata 24-a. Open: 10:00 to 17:00, Wed to Sun. Closed Mon, Tue and the last Sat of the month.