Hermitage

PLANTAGE. Able to exhibit only around five percent of its massive three million-strong collection of art and antiquities, Russia's famous State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg opened a satellite museum in Amsterdam in 2004 devoted to staging rotating exhibitions. Its home is within the monumental Amstelhof, which dates from 1683 and is an impressive example of Dutch classicist architecture. Currently, exhibition space occupies just one tenth of the vast Amstelhof but following renovations, expected to be completed by spring 2009, the museum will make use of the entire complex (totalling 500 square meters of exhibition space). Already hundreds of thousands have flocked to previous exhibitions such as one focusing on 18th-century Venetian art and another which displayed personal objects, paintings and photographs belonging to the last Tsar and Tsarina of Russia, Nicholas II and Alexandra.