1.
Paris
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Paris is the capital and most populous city of France. It has an area of 105 square kilometres and a population of 2,229,621 in 2013 within its administrative limits, the agglomeration has grown well beyond the citys administrative limits. By the 17th century, Paris was one of Europes major centres of finance, commerce, fashion, science, and the arts, and it retains that position still today. The aire urbaine de Paris, a measure of area, spans most of the Île-de-France region and has a population of 12,405,426. It is therefore the second largest metropolitan area in the European Union after London, the Metropole of Grand Paris was created in 2016, combining the commune and its nearest suburbs into a single area for economic and environmental co-operation. Grand Paris covers 814 square kilometres and has a population of 7 million persons, the Paris Region had a GDP of €624 billion in 2012, accounting for 30.0 percent of the GDP of France and ranking it as one of the wealthiest regions in Europe. The city is also a rail, highway, and air-transport hub served by two international airports, Paris-Charles de Gaulle and Paris-Orly. Opened in 1900, the subway system, the Paris Métro. It is the second busiest metro system in Europe after Moscow Metro, notably, Paris Gare du Nord is the busiest railway station in the world outside of Japan, with 262 millions passengers in 2015. In 2015, Paris received 22.2 million visitors, making it one of the top tourist destinations. The association football club Paris Saint-Germain and the rugby union club Stade Français are based in Paris, the 80, 000-seat Stade de France, built for the 1998 FIFA World Cup, is located just north of Paris in the neighbouring commune of Saint-Denis. Paris hosts the annual French Open Grand Slam tennis tournament on the red clay of Roland Garros, Paris hosted the 1900 and 1924 Summer Olympics and is bidding to host the 2024 Summer Olympics. The name Paris is derived from its inhabitants, the Celtic Parisii tribe. Thus, though written the same, the name is not related to the Paris of Greek mythology. In the 1860s, the boulevards and streets of Paris were illuminated by 56,000 gas lamps, since the late 19th century, Paris has also been known as Panam in French slang. Inhabitants are known in English as Parisians and in French as Parisiens and they are also pejoratively called Parigots. The Parisii, a sub-tribe of the Celtic Senones, inhabited the Paris area from around the middle of the 3rd century BC. One of the areas major north-south trade routes crossed the Seine on the île de la Cité, this place of land and water trade routes gradually became a town
2.
France
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France, officially the French Republic, is a country with territory in western Europe and several overseas regions and territories. The European, or metropolitan, area of France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, Overseas France include French Guiana on the South American continent and several island territories in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans. France spans 643,801 square kilometres and had a population of almost 67 million people as of January 2017. It is a unitary republic with the capital in Paris. Other major urban centres include Marseille, Lyon, Lille, Nice, Toulouse, during the Iron Age, what is now metropolitan France was inhabited by the Gauls, a Celtic people. The area was annexed in 51 BC by Rome, which held Gaul until 486, France emerged as a major European power in the Late Middle Ages, with its victory in the Hundred Years War strengthening state-building and political centralisation. During the Renaissance, French culture flourished and a colonial empire was established. The 16th century was dominated by civil wars between Catholics and Protestants. France became Europes dominant cultural, political, and military power under Louis XIV, in the 19th century Napoleon took power and established the First French Empire, whose subsequent Napoleonic Wars shaped the course of continental Europe. Following the collapse of the Empire, France endured a succession of governments culminating with the establishment of the French Third Republic in 1870. Following liberation in 1944, a Fourth Republic was established and later dissolved in the course of the Algerian War, the Fifth Republic, led by Charles de Gaulle, was formed in 1958 and remains to this day. Algeria and nearly all the colonies became independent in the 1960s with minimal controversy and typically retained close economic. France has long been a centre of art, science. It hosts Europes fourth-largest number of cultural UNESCO World Heritage Sites and receives around 83 million foreign tourists annually, France is a developed country with the worlds sixth-largest economy by nominal GDP and ninth-largest by purchasing power parity. In terms of household wealth, it ranks fourth in the world. France performs well in international rankings of education, health care, life expectancy, France remains a great power in the world, being one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council with the power to veto and an official nuclear-weapon state. It is a member state of the European Union and the Eurozone. It is also a member of the Group of 7, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the World Trade Organization, originally applied to the whole Frankish Empire, the name France comes from the Latin Francia, or country of the Franks
3.
Conceptual art
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Conceptual art, sometimes simply called conceptualism, is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Some works of art, sometimes called installations, may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions. The notion that art should examine its own nature was already a potent aspect of the art critic Clement Greenbergs vision of Modern art during the 1950s. One of the first and most important things they questioned was the assumption that the role of the artist was to create special kinds of material objects. Thus, in describing or defining a work of art as conceptual it is important not to confuse what is referred to as conceptual with an artists intention. The French artist Marcel Duchamp paved the way for the conceptualists, providing them examples of prototypically conceptual works — the readymades. The artistic tradition does not see an object as art because it is not made by an artist or with any intention of being art. This concept, also called Art esthapériste, derived from the infinitesimals of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz - quantities which could not actually exist except conceptually, the current incarnation of the Isouian movement, Excoördism, self-defines as the art of the infinitely large and the infinitely small. In 1961 the term art, coined by the artist Henry Flynt in his article bearing the term as its title. By the mid-1970s they had produced publications, indices, performances, texts, in 1970 Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects, the first dedicated conceptual-art exhibition, took place at the New York Cultural Center. Conceptual art emerged as a movement during the 1960s - in part as a reaction against formalism as then articulated by the influential New York art critic Clement Greenberg. According to Greenberg Modern art followed a process of progressive reduction and those elements that ran counter to this nature were to be reduced. The task of painting, for example, was to define precisely what kind of object a painting truly is, later artists continued to share a preference for art to be self-critical, as well as a distaste for illusion. Lawrence Weiner said, Once you know about a work of mine you own it, theres no way I can climb inside somebodys head and remove it. It is sometimes reduced to a set of written instructions describing a work, Language was a central concern for the first wave of conceptual artists of the 1960s and early 1970s. This linguistic turn reinforced and legitimized the direction the artists took. Osborne also notes that the early conceptualists were the first generation of artists to complete degree-based university training in art, osborne later made the observation that contemporary art is post-conceptual in a public lecture delivered at the Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Villa Sucota in Como on July 9,2010. It is a claim made at the level of the ontology of the work of art
4.
Installation art
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Installation art is an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that often are site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called public art, land art or intervention art, however. Installation art can be temporary or permanent. Installation artworks have been constructed in exhibition spaces such as museums and galleries, as well as public, many installations are site-specific in that they are designed to exist only in the space for which they were created, appealing to qualities evident in a three-dimensional immersive medium. Artistic collectives such as the Exhibition Lab at New Yorks American Museum of Natural History created environments to showcase the natural world in as realistic a medium as possible, likewise, Walt Disney Imagineering employed a similar philosophy when designing the multiple immersive spaces for Disneyland in 1955. Since its acceptance as a discipline, a number of institutions focusing on Installation art were created. These included the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, the Museum of Installation in London, the intention of the artist is paramount in much later installation art whose roots lie in the conceptual art of the 1960s. This again is a departure from traditional sculpture which places its focus on form, early non-Western installation art includes events staged by the Gutai group in Japan starting in 1954, which influenced American installation pioneers like Allan Kaprow. Wolf Vostell shows his installation 6 TV Dé-coll/age in 1963 at the Smolin Gallery in New York, Installation as nomenclature for a specific form of art came into use fairly recently, its first use as documented by the Oxford English Dictionary was in 1969. It was coined in this context, in reference to a form of art that had existed since prehistory but was not regarded as a discrete category until the mid-twentieth century. Allan Kaprow used the term Environment in 1958 to describe his transformed indoor spaces, out of the sensory stuff of ordinary life. In Art and Objecthood, Michael Fried derisively labels art that acknowledges the viewer as theatrical, here installation art bestows an unprecedented importance on the observers inclusion in that which he observes. Ultimately, the things a viewer can be assured of when experiencing the work are his own thoughts and preconceptions. All else may be molded by the artists hands, the central importance of the subjective point of view when experiencing installation art, points toward a disregard for traditional Platonic image theory. In effect, the entire installation adopts the character of the simulacrum or flawed statue, Installation art operates fully within the realm of sensory perception, in a sense installing the viewer into an artificial system with an appeal to his subjective perception as its ultimate goal. Interactive installation is a sub-category of installation art, an interactive installation frequently involves the audience acting on the work of art or the piece responding to users activity. With the improvement of technology over the years, artists are able to explore outside of the boundaries that were never able to be explored by artists in the past. The media used are more experimental and bold, they are also usually cross media and may involve sensors, by using virtual reality as a medium, immersive virtual reality art is probably the most deeply interactive form of art
5.
Saas-Fee
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Saas-Fee is the main village in the Saastal, or the Saas Valley, and is a municipality in the district of Visp in the canton of Valais in Switzerland. The villages in its neighborhood are Saas-Almagell, Saas-Grund and Saas-Balen, the community is considered to be a very attractive winter sport destination in the Swiss Alps. Typical activities include skiing, Snowboarding, snowshoe trekking, canyon climbing, Saas-Fee offers 22 lifts, including 3 cable cars,1 funicular railway,5 gondolas,2 chairlifts, the remainder being surface lifts. The ski run has a drop of 1,800 m. Other activities include paragliding, hang gliding, and tobogganing, no cars are allowed to enter the city, only small electric vehicles operate on the streets. The decision to exclude most motor vehicles was made by the village at the time of the construction of the road from Saas Grund in 1951. The resort offers many culture, sports and off-slope activities, including music, a sports and leisure complex, restaurants. The resort features the highest underground funicular railway in the world up to the skiing area, the touristic slogan of Saas-Fee is Die Perle der Alpen. The campus of the European Graduate School is located in Saas-Fee, design guidelines for the village require houses to be 40 percent wooden, to maintain its architectural character. Saas-Fee is first mentioned in 1304 as vee, the municipality was formerly known by its French name Fée, however, that name is no longer used. Saas-Fee has an area, as of 2011, of 40.6 square kilometers, of this area,5. 7% is used for agricultural purposes, while 9. 5% is forested. Of the rest of the land,1. 3% is settled and 83. 6% is unproductive land, the municipality is located in the Visp district, at the foot of Dom Mountain. The village is surrounded by thirteen Four-thousander mountains, the blazon of the municipal coat of arms is Azure, the initials SSF Or between two Mullets Argent in base Coupeaux Vert. Saas-Fee has a population of 1,621, as of 2008,28. 5% of the population are resident foreign nationals. Over the last 10 years the population has changed at a rate of 3. 4% and it has changed at a rate of 0. 5% due to migration and at a rate of 6. 3% due to births and deaths. Most of the population speaks German as their first language, Serbo-Croatian is the second most common, there are 16 people who speak French,12 people who speak Italian and 2 people who speak Romansh. Of the population in the municipality,745 or about 51. 2% were born in Saas-Fee and lived there in 2000. There were 200 or 13. 8% who were born in the canton, while 207 or 14. 2% were born somewhere else in Switzerland
6.
University of California, San Diego
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The University of California, San Diego is a public research university located in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego, California, in the United States. The university occupies 2,141 acres near the coast of the Pacific Ocean with the main campus resting on approximately 1,152 acres, UC San Diego is organized into six undergraduate residential colleges, three graduate schools, and two professional medical schools. UC San Diego is also home to Scripps Institution of Oceanography, one of the first centers dedicated to ocean, earth and atmospheric science research and education. UC San Diego Health, the only academic health system, provides patient care, conducts medical research. According to the National Science Foundation, UC San Diego spent $1.101 billion on research and development in fiscal year 2015, ranking it 5th in the nation. UC San Diego faculty, researchers, and alumni have won 20 Nobel Prizes, eight National Medals of Science, eight MacArthur Fellowships, two Pulitzer Prizes, and three Fields medals. Local citizens supported the idea, voting the same year to transfer to the university 59 acres of land on the coast near the preexisting Scripps Institution of Oceanography. This outraged local conservatives, as well as Regent Edwin W. Pauley, UC President Clark Kerr satisfied San Diego city donors by changing the proposed name from University of California, La Jolla, to University of California, San Diego. The city voted in agreement to its part in 1958, because of the clash with Pauley, Revelle was not made chancellor. Herbert York, first director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, was designated instead, York planned the main campus according to the Oxbridge model, relying on many of Revelles ideas. UC San Diego was the first general campus of the University of California to be designed from the top down in terms of research emphasis, local leaders disagreed on whether the new school should be a technical research institute or a more broadly based school that included undergraduates as well. John Jay Hopkins of General Dynamics Corporation pledged one million dollars for the former while the City Council offered free land for the latter, maria Goeppert-Mayer, later the second female Nobel laureate in physics, was appointed professor of physics in 1960. The graduate division of the school opened in 1960 with 20 faculty in residence, with instruction offered in the fields of physics, biology, chemistry, before the main campus completed construction, classes were held in the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. By 1963, new facilities on the mesa had been finished for the School of Science and Engineering, ten additional faculty in those disciplines were hired, and the whole site was designated the First College, later renamed after Roger Revelle, of the new campus. York resigned as chancellor that year and was replaced by John Semple Galbraith, the undergraduate program accepted its first class of 181 freshman at Revelle College in 1964. Second College was founded in 1964, on the land deeded by the federal government, the School of Medicine also accepted its first students in 1966. Political theorist Herbert Marcuse joined the faculty in 1965, a champion of the New Left, he reportedly was the first protestor to occupy the administration building in a demonstration organized by his student, political activist Angela Davis. Further student unrest was felt at the university, as the United States increased its involvement in the Vietnam War during the early 1960s, protests escalated as the war continued and were only exacerbated after the National Guard fired on student protesters at Kent State University in 1970
7.
Mills College
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Mills College is a liberal arts and sciences college located in the San Francisco Bay Area. Mills was founded as the Young Ladies Seminary in 1852 in Benicia, California, the school was relocated to Oakland, California, in 1871, and became the first womens college west of the Rockies. Currently, Mills is a womens college with graduate programs for women and men. The college offers more than 60 undergraduate majors and minors and over 25 graduate degrees, certificates, the college is also home to the Mills College School of Education and the Lorry I. Lokey Graduate School of Business & Public Policy, in 1865, Susan Tolman Mills, a graduate of Mount Holyoke College, and her husband, Cyrus Mills, bought the Young Ladies Seminary renaming it Mills Seminary. In 1871, the school was moved to Oakland, California, the school became Mills College in 1885. In 1890, after serving for decades as principal, Susan Mills became the president of the college, beginning in 1906 the seminary classes were progressively eliminated. In 1921, Mills granted its first masters degrees, on May 3,1990, the Trustees announced that they had voted to admit male undergraduate students to Mills. This decision led to a student and staff strike, accompanied by numerous displays of non-violent protests by the students. At one point, nearly 300 students blockaded the administrative offices, on May 18, the Trustees met again to reconsider the decision, leading finally to a reversal of the vote. In 2014, Mills became the first single-sex college in the U. S. to adopt a policy explicitly welcoming transgender students, Mills offers more than 60 undergraduate majors and minors across the arts and sciences, as well as the option to design your own college major. The school runs on a system, with optional winter and summer sessions. As of the 2014-2015 academic years, Mills’ top 5 most popular majors are, English, Nursing, Psychology, Biology, and Political, Legal, the engineering program in conjunction with University of Southern California is a five-year program, with the first three years completed at Mills. After completing the program, students will have received a BA from Mills, available tracks include biomedical, chemical, computer, electrical, environmental, and industrial systems engineering. Undergraduate students can participate in one of eight bachelors-to-masters accelerated degree programs, which students to earn an undergraduate. Mills is accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, rated by Washington Monthly in their 2014 Top Master’s Universities study, Mills ranked 8th out of 100 institutions when considering Social Mobility, Research, and Service. The school’s graduate program offers over 25 degrees, credentials, and these include unique programs in Bio-chemistry, Book Art, Interdisciplinary Computer Science, Infant Mental Health, and Pre-Medical studies, as well as groundbreaking joint-degree programs. Currently the school’s top 5 most popular programs are, Education, Business Administration, Pre-Med, English
8.
Oakland, California
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Oakland /ˈoʊklənd/ is the largest city and the county seat of Alameda County, California, United States. The city was incorporated in 1852, Oaklands territory covers what was once a mosaic of California coastal terrace prairie, oak woodland, and north coastal scrub. Its land served as a resource when its hillside oak and redwood timber were logged to build San Francisco. In the late 1860s, Oakland was selected as the terminal of the Transcontinental Railroad. Following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, many San Francisco citizens moved to Oakland, enlarging the citys population, increasing its housing stock and it continued to grow in the 20th century with its busy port, shipyards, and a thriving automobile manufacturing industry. Oakland is known for its sustainability practices, including a top-ranking for usage of electricity from renewable resources, in addition, due to a steady influx of immigrants during the 20th century, along with thousands of African-American war-industry workers who relocated from the Deep South during the 1940s. Oakland is the most ethnically diverse city in the country. The earliest known inhabitants were the Huchiun Indians, who lived there for thousands of years, the Huchiun belonged to a linguistic grouping later called the Ohlone. In Oakland, they were concentrated around Lake Merritt and Temescal Creek, in 1772, the area that later became Oakland was claimed, with the rest of California, by Spanish settlers for the King of Spain. In the early 19th century, the Spanish crown granted the East Bay area to Luis María Peralta for his Rancho San Antonio, the grant was confirmed by the successor Mexican republic upon its independence from Spain. Upon his death in 1842, Peralta divided his land among his four sons, Most of Oakland fell within the shares given to Antonio Maria and Vicente. The portion of the parcel that is now Oakland was called encinal—Spanish for oak grove—due to the oak forest that covered the area. In 1851, three men—Horace Carpentier, Edson Adams, and Andrew Moon—began developing what is now downtown Oakland, on May 4,1852, the Town of Oakland incorporated. Two years later, on March 25,1854, Oakland re-incorporated as the City of Oakland, with Horace Carpentier elected the first mayor, the city and its environs quickly grew with the railroads, becoming a major rail terminal in the late 1860s and 1870s. In 1868, the Central Pacific constructed the Oakland Long Wharf at Oakland Point, a number of horsecar and cable car lines were constructed in Oakland during the latter half of the 19th century. The first electric streetcar set out from Oakland to Berkeley in 1891, at the time of incorporation, Oakland consisted of the territory that lay south of todays major intersection of San Pablo Avenue, Broadway, and Fourteenth Street. The city gradually annexed farmlands and settlements to the east and the north, Oaklands rise to industrial prominence, and its subsequent need for a seaport, led to the digging of a shipping and tidal channel in 1902. This resulted in the town of Alameda being made an island
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California
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California is the most populous state in the United States and the third most extensive by area. Located on the western coast of the U. S, California is bordered by the other U. S. states of Oregon, Nevada, and Arizona and shares an international border with the Mexican state of Baja California. Los Angeles is Californias most populous city, and the second largest after New York City. The Los Angeles Area and the San Francisco Bay Area are the nations second- and fifth-most populous urban regions, California also has the nations most populous county, Los Angeles County, and its largest county by area, San Bernardino County. The Central Valley, an agricultural area, dominates the states center. What is now California was first settled by various Native American tribes before being explored by a number of European expeditions during the 16th and 17th centuries, the Spanish Empire then claimed it as part of Alta California in their New Spain colony. The area became a part of Mexico in 1821 following its war for independence. The western portion of Alta California then was organized as the State of California, the California Gold Rush starting in 1848 led to dramatic social and demographic changes, with large-scale emigration from the east and abroad with an accompanying economic boom. If it were a country, California would be the 6th largest economy in the world, fifty-eight percent of the states economy is centered on finance, government, real estate services, technology, and professional, scientific and technical business services. Although it accounts for only 1.5 percent of the states economy, the story of Calafia is recorded in a 1510 work The Adventures of Esplandián, written as a sequel to Amadis de Gaula by Spanish adventure writer Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo. The kingdom of Queen Calafia, according to Montalvo, was said to be a land inhabited by griffins and other strange beasts. This conventional wisdom that California was an island, with maps drawn to reflect this belief, shortened forms of the states name include CA, Cal. Calif. and US-CA. Settled by successive waves of arrivals during the last 10,000 years, various estimates of the native population range from 100,000 to 300,000. The Indigenous peoples of California included more than 70 distinct groups of Native Americans, ranging from large, settled populations living on the coast to groups in the interior. California groups also were diverse in their organization with bands, tribes, villages. Trade, intermarriage and military alliances fostered many social and economic relationships among the diverse groups, the first European effort to explore the coast as far north as the Russian River was a Spanish sailing expedition, led by Portuguese captain Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, in 1542. Some 37 years later English explorer Francis Drake also explored and claimed a portion of the California coast in 1579. Spanish traders made unintended visits with the Manila galleons on their trips from the Philippines beginning in 1565
10.
Centre Georges Pompidou
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It was designed in the style of high-tech architecture by the architectural team of Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, along with Gianfranco Franchini. Because of its location, the Centre is known locally as Beaubourg and it is named after Georges Pompidou, the President of France from 1969 to 1974 who commissioned the building, and was officially opened on 31 January 1977 by President Valéry Giscard dEstaing. As of 2006, the Centre Pompidou has had over 180 million visitors since 1977 and more than 5,209,678 visitors in 2013, including 3,746,899 for the museum. The sculpture Horizontal by Alexander Calder, a mobile that is 7.6 m tall, was placed in front of the Centre Pompidou in 2012. Hoping to renew the idea of Paris as a city of culture and art. Paris also needed a large, free library, as one did not exist at this time. At first the debate concerned Les Halles, but as the settled, in 1968. A year later in 1969, the new president adopted the Beaubourg project, in the process of developing the project, the IRCAM was also housed in the complex. By the mid-1980s, the Centre Pompidou was becoming the victim of its huge and unexpected popularity, its activities. By 1992, the Centre de Création Industrielle was incorporated into the Centre Pompidou, since re-opening in 2000 after a three-year renovation, the Centre Pompidou has improved accessibility for visitors. Now they can access the escalators if they pay to enter the museum. The Centre was designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano, British architect Richard Rogers, the project was awarded to this team in an architectural design competition, the results of which were announced in 1971. It was the first time in France that international architects were allowed to participate, world-renowned architects Oscar Niemeyer, Jean Prouvé and Philip Johnson made up the jury which would select one design out of the 681 entries. National Geographic described the reaction to the design as love at second sight, an article in Le Figaro declared Paris has its own monster, just like the one in Loch Ness. The Pritzker jury said the Pompidou revolutionised museums, transforming what had once been elite monuments into popular places of social and cultural exchange, the Centre was built by GTM and completed in 1977. The building cost 993 million 1972 French francs, renovation work conducted from October 1996 to January 2000 was completed on a budget of 576 million 1999 francs. The black-painted mechanical sculptures are by Tinguely, the works by de Saint-Phalle. Video footage of the fountain appeared frequently throughout the French language telecourse, the Place Georges Pompidou in front of the museum is noted for the presence of street performers, such as mimes and jugglers
11.
Hermitage Museum
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The State Hermitage Museum is a museum of art and culture in Saint Petersburg, Russia. One of the largest and oldest museums in the world, it was founded in 1754 by Catherine the Great and has open to the public since 1852. Its collections, of only a small part is on permanent display. The collections occupy a complex of six historic buildings along Palace Embankment, including the Winter Palace. Apart from them, the Menshikov Palace, Museum of Porcelain, Storage Facility at Staraya Derevnya, the museum has several exhibition centers abroad. The Hermitage is a state property. Since July 1992, the director of the museum has been Mikhail Piotrovsky, of the six buildings in the main museum complex, five, namely the Winter Palace, Small Hermitage, Old Hermitage, New Hermitage and Hermitage Theatre, are open to the public. The entrance ticket for foreign tourists more than the fee paid by citizens of Russia. However, entrance is free of charge the first Thursday of every month for all visitors, the museum is closed on Mondays. The entrance for visitors is located in the Winter Palace. A hermitage is the dwelling of a hermit or recluse, the word derives from Old French hermit, ermit hermit, recluse, from Late Latin eremita, from Greek eremites, literally people who live alone, which is in turn derived from ἐρημός, desert. Originally, the building housing the collection was the Small Hermitage. Today, the Hermitage Museum encompasses many buildings on the Palace Embankment, apart from the Small Hermitage, the museum now also includes the Old Hermitage, the New Hermitage, the Hermitage Theatre, and the Winter Palace, the former main residence of the Russian tsars. In recent years, the Hermitage has expanded to the General Staff Building on the Palace Square facing the Winter Palace, the Western European Art collection includes European paintings, sculpture, and applied art from the 13th to the 20th centuries. It is displayed, in about 120 rooms, on the first, drawings and prints are displayed in temporary exhibitions. Since 1940, the Egyptian collection, dating back to 1852 and it serves as a passage to the exhibition of Classical Antiquities. A modest collection of the culture of Ancient Mesopotamia, including a number of Assyrian reliefs from Babylon, Dur-Sharrukin, the collection of Classical Antiquities occupies most of the ground floor of the Old and New Hermitage buildings. Its floor is made of a marble mosaic imitating ancient tradition, while the stucco walls
