Visit: The State Hermitage Museum, Palace Square, 2, St. Petersburg 191055 Russia
The Hermitage is considered to have been founded in 1764, when Empress Catherine the Great acquired an impressive collection of works from the Berlin merchant Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky. The collection of the State Hermitage includes over 3 million works of art and world culture artefacts. It contains paintings, graphic works, sculptures, works of applied art, archaeological artifacts and numismatic objects.
See the pearls of Egyptian antiquities, Prehistoric art, Italian, Spanish, German, Swiss, British, French and, of course, Russian art, marvelous pieces of jewelry and decorative art.
The Hermitage also has a population of cats serving the attraction. They live in the the museum's basement and keep the collection from the mice, during summer you can them meet on the embankment and on the square.