Massachusetts

Boston wears its history on its sleeve, and the best introduction is the Freedom Trail — a 2.5-mile red-brick line through the old city linking sixteen Revolutionary-era sites, among them Boston Common, the gold-domed State House, the Granary Burying Ground, Faneuil Hall, Paul Revere's house in the Italian North End, the Old North Church and, across the harbour, Bunker Hill and the USS Constitution, the oldest commissioned warship still afloat. Beyond the trail the city is a pleasure to wander: the gaslit brick streets and bowfront houses of Beacon Hill, the cannoli and trattorias of the North End, the swan boats of the Public Garden, the shops of Newbury Street and the beloved ballpark at Fenway. Compact and walkable, Boston packs centuries into a day or two.

Just across the Charles River, Cambridge is home to two of the world's great universities and a powerful reason to cross the water. Harvard, founded in 1636 and the oldest university in the country, centres on the leafy quadrangle of Harvard Yard and runs a superb cluster of museums — art, natural history and the famous glass flowers. A short walk down Massachusetts Avenue, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology adds bold modern architecture, a hands-on museum and an atmosphere of restless invention that has shaped the region's biotech and tech economy. Buzzing Harvard Square, with its bookshops, cafés and street musicians, is the natural place to soak up the college-town energy, and the riverbank paths make for a fine walk or bike ride back towards Boston.

Massachusetts holds one of the richest concentrations of art and culture in the country. In Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts ranks among America's finest, its collections spanning ancient Egypt to the Impressionists, while the intimate Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum recreates a Venetian palazzo around a glass-roofed courtyard garden. The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, in a striking waterfront building, and the harbourside Institute of Contemporary Art round out the city's museum scene. The energy carries statewide: the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem is a world-class institution built on the town's global trading past, and out west the vast MASS MoCA fills a former mill complex with cutting-edge installations — proof that the state's cultural life reaches far beyond the capital.

In summer the state heads for the coast, and above all for Cape Cod, the sandy peninsula curling into the Atlantic. The Cape Cod National Seashore protects forty miles of dune-backed beach, lighthouses and kettle ponds, while towns from genteel Chatham to lively, artistic Provincetown at the very tip give each stretch its own character. Two ferry-served islands complete the picture: Martha's Vineyard, with its gingerbread cottages, clay cliffs at Aquinnah and gentle beaches, and Nantucket, a former whaling capital whose cobbled streets, grey-shingled houses and Whaling Museum feel frozen in the nineteenth century. Bicycles, beach days and fresh seafood — lobster rolls, fried clams and oysters — are the currency of a Cape and Islands holiday.

North of Boston the coast is thick with the state's founding history. Plymouth, on the South Shore, marks the Pilgrims' 1620 landing with Plymouth Rock, the full-scale replica ship Mayflower II and the living-history museum of Plimoth Patuxet, where costumed interpreters bring both the English settlement and a Wampanoag homesite to life. Salem, famous for its 1692 witch trials, has turned that history into a cluster of museums and become the country's great Halloween destination each October, though its finest sight is the maritime past preserved at the Peabody Essex Museum and the gabled House of the Seven Gables. Further along Cape Ann, the working fishing port of Gloucester and the artists' colony of Rockport, with its much-painted red fishing shack, round out a rewarding North Shore day.

The western third of the state rises into the rolling Berkshire hills, a summer and autumn retreat of culture set in green mountains. Tanglewood, near Lenox, is the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, drawing music lovers to concerts on its great lawn, while nearby the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge holds the world's largest collection of the illustrator's work and Edith Wharton's estate, The Mount, opens its gardens and rooms. In the old mill town of North Adams, MASS MoCA has become one of the largest contemporary-art centres anywhere. To the south the Pioneer Valley gathers the college towns of Amherst — home of the poet Emily Dickinson — and Northampton around the Five Colleges, and Mount Greylock, the state's highest peak, crowns it all. Autumn, when the hills turn scarlet and gold, is the region's signature season.

Boston's Logan International Airport is the region's main gateway, just minutes from downtown, and the city's MBTA — “the T,” the oldest subway in the United States — together with buses and commuter rail makes central Massachusetts easy to explore without a car. For Cape Cod, the islands (reached by ferry from Hyannis and Woods Hole) and the Berkshires, though, a rental car is the practical choice. The state has four distinct seasons: warm summers ideal for the coast and islands, a world-famous autumn foliage display peaking in late September and October, snowy winters, and a fresh, blossoming spring. Autumn is the classic time to visit, with the coast at its best in high summer.