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By Karin Beuerlein

The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. Photo: Niklas Nordblad

6. The State Hermitage Museum — St. Petersburg, Russia
www.hermitagemuseum.org

Establishing the Hermitage museum was Catherine the Great's way of trying to dispel the popular image of Russia as a crude and backward province. She sought to amass a personal collection that would rival any in Europe, and she didn't do too shabby a job: Catherine increased the royal stock of paintings from 250 when she came to the throne in 1762 to more than 4,000 at the time of her death three decades later.

Today's Hermitage Museum includes not only 17,000 paintings and millions of exhibits, but also St. Petersburg's famed Winter Palace, the magnificent home of Russia's czars for centuries. The Western European masters are well-represented here — da Vinci, Raphael, Rubens, Monet, van Gogh and many more — but the massive collection also offers fascinating prehistoric pieces, antiquities, medieval items and arms and weaponry.

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