Isabella Stewart Gardner spent decades and a fortune buying paintings, sculpture, manuscripts, and architectural fragments across Europe, then built a Venetian-style palace in the Fens to put them in. The Italian courtyard at the centre — a glass-roofed garden filled with flowers in changing seasonal displays — is one of the most arresting spaces in any museum.
Her will stipulated that nothing be moved, ever; the rooms are still arranged exactly as she left them in 1924, eccentric and dense and personal. A Titian opposite a Sargent opposite a fourteenth-century Tuscan altarpiece — sometimes lit by daylight from the courtyard, sometimes barely lit at all. The Renzo Piano addition (2012) handles the cafe, temporary exhibitions, and concert hall, and never intrudes on the original.
Admission is free on your birthday and for anyone named Isabella. The infamous 1990 theft is acknowledged with empty frames on the wall where the Vermeer and the Rembrandts used to hang.