Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is a Venetian palace in the Fenway filled with masterpieces — and empty frames where masterpieces used to be. On March 18, 1990, two men dressed as Boston police officers talked their way into the museum, tied up the guards, and spent 81 minutes stealing 13 works including a Vermeer, three Rembrandts, a Manet, and five Degas sketches. The FBI estimates the stolen works at $500 million. None have been recovered. The empty frames still hang on the walls, per Gardner's wishes that nothing in the museum be moved.

Gardner herself was one of Boston's most extraordinary characters — a New York socialite who married into Boston money, travelled obsessively, befriended artists from Sargent to Whistler, and built an entire Venetian palazzo in the Fenway to house her collection. The building, completed in 1903, is arranged around a four-story glass-roofed courtyard filled with flowers that change seasonally — one of the most beautiful interior spaces in America. The galleries on the upper floors are arranged exactly as Gardner left them, mixing Old Masters with personal objects in a style that feels more like visiting a private home than a museum.

Renzo Piano's 2012 addition provides a modern counterpoint — clean glass and copper next to Gardner's Gothic-Venetian fantasy — and houses temporary exhibitions, a concert hall, and a café. The concert series, held in the museum's Tapestry Room on Sundays, is one of Boston's best-kept cultural secrets. And anyone named Isabella gets in free, forever — Gardner put it in her will.