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Boston’s best walking tour is free, self-guided, chock-full of history, and open year round. Just follow the painted red stripe threading its way past historic buildings such as the Massachusetts State House (Hall of Flags (see The Freedom Trail)).

Swan boats drift beneath weeping willows, children splash in fountains, and a bronzed General George Washington oversees the proceedings from his lofty steed (see Boston Common & Public Garden).

Boston may have its legendary blue blood, but neighboring Cambridge claims the Harvard Crimson. Pumping vigorously since 1636, the undisputed heart of American academia has cultivated some of the world’s greatest thinkers (see Harvard University).

The MFA, Boston’s undisputed queen of the visual arts scene, boasts some of the most extensive collections of Japanese, ancient Egyptian, and Impressionist works of art in the world. Van Gogh’s Houses at Auvers (1890;) is just one of many treasures in the European Art collection (see Museum of Fine Arts).

Where fashionistas share the sidewalk with punk rockers. Nowhere is the city’s myriad fashions, faces, and fortunes on more vibrant display (see Around Newbury Street).

The works of Rembrandt, Botticelli, and Sargent appear all the more masterful in Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Venetian-style palazzo. The courtyard’s myriad treasures include an ancient Roman marble sarcophagus dating to AD 222 (see Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum).

Boston’s deep harbor made it ideal for one of the US Navy’s first shipyards. USS Constitution, the most famous of the yard’s progeny, is still docked here (see Charlestown Navy Yard).

Get personal with three species of penguins, harbor seals, and many other creatures of the deep. The vast 200,000 gallon (900,000 liter) Giant Ocean Tank is the aquarium’s centerpiece, where an upward-spiraling walkway guides you around the ecosystem (see New England Aquarium).

This late 19th-century brownstone building, on what was once Boston’s most fashionable street, is a favorite stopover for European travelers on a budget. Most rooms have kitchenettes, private bath, phones with voice mail, and cable TV. Weekly apartment rentals are also available.

With just five spacious, Victorian-style rooms, this four-story brick townhouse in the South End feels like a private home. Each room is decorated differently but all have granite-tiled baths, a wet bar, and queen-size beds. A short walk from Copley and Back Bay “T” stops, it’s pretty central, too.

This townhouse hotel is mere steps from Boston Common (see Boston Common & Public Garden). The rooms are mostly small but Euro-chic, and there’s a first-floor bistro that serves breakfast (included in rates). There’s even a private roofdeck for guests.

Most rooms in this friendly Victorian-style B&B have private baths, but four share. Guests also have use of a kitchen.

Should your predilection be antique jewelry, keep this address in mind. Ornate gold brooches, platinum earrings – plus excellent examples of Wedgwood ceramic work – populate the glass cases here.

This synagogue testifies to the area’s former vibrancy as Boston’s first predominantly Jewish quarter. The congregation was founded in 1903 by immigrants from Vilna, Lithuania. While services are no longer held here, there are plans to rededicate the synagogue as a Jewish cultural center.

Although it extends well beyond the Fenway, Beacon Street finds its true essence in the section between the Massachusetts State House (see Massachusetts State House) and Charles Street. Here it passes such highlights as the Bull and Finch Pub – of Cheers TV fame – and the Boston Athenaeum, one of the oldest independent libraries in the country.

The massive Cyclorama building is the centerpiece of the BCA, a performing and visual arts complex dedicated to nurturing new talent. The center provides studio space to more than 50 artists, and its Mills Gallery mounts rotating visual arts exhibitions. The BCA’s three theaters host some of the city’s most avant-garde productions of dance, theater, and performance art (see Boston Center for the Arts).

Formerly known as the Old Corner Bookstore, this enduring spot on the Freedom Trail remains one of the most tangible sites associated with the writers of the New England Renaissance of the last half of the 19th century. Both the Atlantic Monthly magazine and Ticknor & Fields (publishers of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau) made this modest structure its headquarters during an age when Boston was the literary, intellectual, and publishing center of the country. The store now features daily papers, books maps, and special editions and reprints of the Boston Globe newspaper.

Although this McKim, Mead, and White-designed building went up in 1895, the Boston Public Library was actually founded in 1848 and is the oldest publiclyfunded library in the country. The interior’s Greco-Roman style cues lavish use of marble, and John Singer Sargent’s powerful “Judaism and Christianity” mural sequence clearly illustrates how highly public education was valued when the library was constructed. Guided tours offer insight into the building’s architecture and history.

The historic occasion (known as the Boston Tea Party) when patriots, dressed as native Americans, threw a consignment of English tea overboard to protest against the Stamp Tax of 1773, proved to be a precipitating event of the American Revolution (see Boston Tea Party (1773)). The Boston Tea Party ship is a replica of the brig Beaver, one of the vessels deprived of its cargo that fateful December night. Aboard the ship, costumed storytellers recount events in rousing detail while visitors sip tea (or dump it over the rail). Over the centuries Boston has expanded into the harbor and the tea party site now lies firmly inland at 470 Atlantic Avenue, where a plaque marks the event.

This venerable funhouse pioneered the interactive-exhibit concept that is now utilized in museums worldwide. Accolades aside, the Children’s Museum is an absolute blast for kids and parents alike. It includes a climbing wall, a sprawling jungle gym, and cultural experiences like a walk-through, simulated Latin American supermarket.

Educators at this ground-breaking interactive museum for kids pioneered some of the features now found in similar facilities around the world, including giant soap bubbles and complex rampways for marbles (see Children’s Museum).

When the Custom House was built in 1840, Boston was one of America’s largest overseas shipping ports, and customs fees were the mainstay of the Federal budget. The Neo-Classical structure once sat on the waterfront, but now stands two blocks inland. The 16-story Custom House tower, added in 1913, was Boston’s first skyscraper. Since the 1990s, peregrine falcons have nested in the clock tower under the watchful eyes of wildlife biologists. The lobby displays a few artifacts from the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, and tours of the tower give sweeping harbor views.

Boston’s Puritan leaders established a college at Newtowne (later Cambridge) to educate future generations of clergy. When young Charlestown minister John Harvard died two years later and left his books and half his money to the college, it was renamed Harvard (see Harvard University).

Friction between colonists and the British crown had been building for more than a decade when British troops marched on Lexington to confiscate rebel weapons. Forewarned by Paul Revere (see Paul Revere (1735–1818)), local militia, known as the Minute Men, skirmished with British regulars on Lexington Green. During the second confrontation at Concord, the shot heard round the world marked the beginning of the Revolution, which ended in American independence with the 1783 Treaty of Paris.

This historical walking tour was established, with its familiar red brick and paint connecting the city’s sights. It was based on a 1951 Boston Herald Traveler column by William Scofield, and was the first of its kind in the US.

Thirty miles (48 km) north of Boston, the granite brow of Cape Ann juts defiantly into the Atlantic – a rugged landscape of precipitous cliffs and deeply cleft harbors. In Gloucester, the cape’s main harbor, a waterfront plaque memorializes the 10,000 local fishermen who have perished at sea since 1623, and the Cape Ann Historical Association Museum (27 Pleasant St) displays some of the world’s finest maritime paintings. The picturesque harborfront of adjacent Rockport is an artists’ enclave and is lined with galleries and sweet shops.

Connected to the mainland via an earthen causeway and crowned by the c.1851 Fort Independence, Castle Island is New England’s oldest continually fortified site (see Pleasure Bay). Aside from exploring the fort’s bunkers and tunnels, visitors can take in fine panoramic views of Boston Harbor.