Hermitage Museum the honor was awarded to the city of Ferrara which proposed its Castle Estense as the base. Since then, the new institution called "Ermitage Italia" started a research and scientific collaboration with the Hermitage foundation. Hermitage-Vyborg Center was opened in June 2010 in Vyborg, Leningrad Oblast. A Hermitage branch is due to open in Vladivostok by 2016, and the regional government has allocated more than Rb17.7 million ($558,000) for preliminary reconstruction work on a mansion in Vladivostok’s historic downtown district to house the satellite. The Hermitage-Siberia is due to open in Omsk in 2016. In recent years, there have been
Egyptian Collection of the Hermitage Museum Alexei Norov from Theban Necropolis of the Eleventh dynasty of Egypt in the 1830s, was moved from the Imperial Academy of Arts to the Hermitage. Some items were purchased for the museum from antiquities traders in Egypt and collections of Russian merchants or received as gifts. In 1862 the collection expanded significantly, as the Castiglione collection, which was purchased by the Imperial Academy of Sciences from Carlo Ottavio Castiglione in Milan in 1826 and consisted of more than 900 items, core of the Egyptian museum of the Kunstkamera, was transferred to the Hermitage. However, there were no Egyptologists in Russia