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From Italy to the Hermitage

Published 03 June 2020

The 3 June 2020 will see the start of the project “From Italy to the Hermitage”, created by Italian colleagues as a mark of respect and gratitude for the series of guided tours “From the Hermitage to Italy”.

Since 27 March, the State Hermitage has been implementing the “From the Hermitage to Italy” project in which members of the museum staff have conducted a series of guided tours in Italian or with Italian subtitles. The cultural bridge constructed between the two countries will be reinforced by the reciprocal project – guided tours of Italian museums in Russian. The new project is being realized on the initiative of the Hermitage–Italy Foundation in collaboration with Villaggio Globale International and the Italian Cultural Institute in Saint Petersburg with the support of the Embassy of Italy in the Russian Federation and the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism.

Participating in the project are world-famous museums from northern, central and southern Italy: the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria in Perugia in conjunction with the CariPergugia Foundation, and the Museo Nazionale Archeologico, Naples in conjunction with the University of Naples “L’Orientale”.

The first guided tour will take place on 3 June and will allow people in Russia to make a virtual visit to the Museo Nazionale Archeologico in Naples and to see its most striking and valuable collections: the Egyptian halls, the Magna Graecia display that was recently reopened after an interval of 20 years, the Farnese collection, and items from Pompeii and Herculaneum, the towns buried by Mount Vesuvius. Masterpieces from the collection visited the Hermitage in 2019 for the exhibition “Gods, Men, Heroes. From the Museo Nazionale Archeologico, Naples and the Parco Archeologico di Pompei”. The tour guides will be students of the Department of Literary, Linguistic and Comparative Studies at the University of Naples “L’Orientale”. They have not only translated the text of the tour, but also compiled special Italian-Russian glossaries of archaeological terms for future use.

The following guided tour, of the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, will be published on 8 June. During a virtual stroll around the gallery, members of its staff will speak about the greatest artists of central Italy in the 14th–17th centuries, including Arnolfo di Cambio, Gentile da Fabriano, Duccio di Buoninsegna, Fra Beato Angelico and, of course, Piero della Francesca. In 2018–19, the State Hermitage hosted the exhibition “Piero della Francesca. Monarch of Painting” that featured his famed Annunciation from the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria. During this tour, there will be the opportunity to get acquainted with the CariPergugia Foundation that specially for the Russian public will open the doors of the Palazzo Baldeschi al Corso, a splendid building used for exhibitions of contemporary art. Viewers will see both the interiors of the palace, which were created over a period of several centuries, and the collection of works of art housed there.

On 15 June, viewers will find themselves transported to La Serenissima – Venice. The Fondazione Musei Civici will be providing a guided tour, the main theme of which will be the historical and cultural kinship between Venice and Saint Petersburg. Our Italian colleagues will devote their narrative to one of the greatest representatives of the Venetian Renaissance – Titian, who fell victim to an earlier pandemic, the plague.

The online guided tours will be published in the State Hermitage’s official group in VKontakte: https://vk.com/hermitage_museum, on the Hermitage’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/thehermitagemuseum and also on the channels of the museums participating in the project. The tours will be published at 6.30 pm Moscow time (UTC+3).