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Art
We started ‘modestly,’ with the visit to a luxurious Usupov Palace in St. Petersburg. Before the revolution, it belonged to a higher echelon of aristocracy, a family with close ties to the tsar family. It’s in the basement of this palace that Rasputin was murdered, the scene reproduced in wax figures.

The portrait of the assassin, young Felix Usupov, is now hanging in the Russian Museum. After the revolution, Felix Usupov fled the country smuggling one Rembrandt out of the vast art collection his family owned. His memoirs, written in French and translated into many languages, provide an insights into the life of the Russian nobility at the turn of the 20th century. The famous Serov’s portrait of his mother, Countess Usupov, has been removed from the Usupov palace and can be also seen in the Russian museum.

With the possible exception of the Louvre, there is no museum in the world that rivals the Hermitage in size and quality. Its opulent baroque facade, stretching two hundred meters, is a veritable cornucopia of pilasters, bays, and statuary. Its collection is so large that it would take years to view it in its entirety–at last count, there were nearly three million works on exhibit.

The museum is especially strong in Italian Renaissance and French Impressionist paintings, as well as possessing outstanding collections of works by Leonardo, Rembrandt, and Rafael.

We were lucky to see a special collection of Scythian gold. (In Moscow, we were shown collection of the Trojan gold as well).