Meeting of M. B. Piotrovsky, Director of the State Hermitage Museum, with Mayor of Venice Giorgio Orsoni

On 8 February 2011 Mikhail Borisovich Piotrovsky met mayor of Venice Giorgio Orsoni in the Director’s Office of the State Hermitage Museum. Orsoni, who has recently been elected to occupy this high position and who has never visited Russia, decided to get to know the country with visiting the Hermitage.

Orsoni said he was amazed to see the museum’s collections and to know how rich and diverse the exhibits were. The mayor emphasized that Hermitage was one of the few museums in the world where Venice art is exhibited in a special collection.

The topics discussed during the informal and friendly talk were of mutual interest. As the relations with Venice had a long history and were traditionally close, the Hermitage director and the Venice mayor agreed to prepare and sign a memorandum of understanding on different joint cultural projects in the near future. This concerns both the scheduled activities of the Hermitage-Italy Center (history of collecting and forming museum collections, restoration and conservation of monuments, diaries of Russian and Italian travellers) and peculiarities of Venice as a world center of art. It is the Venice Biennale that brings together all the leading critics, collectors and connoisseurs of contemporary trends in art once in two years. The Hermitage is going to take an active part in several projects timed to coincide with the Biennale.

The memorandum may as well be signed in Venice in early March at the formal opening of the Center of the Russian Language and Literature at Ca'Foscari Univeristy in Venice.

Meeting of Venice mayor Giorgio Orsoni and Mikhail Piotrovsky