Providence punches well above its weight for a city of 180,000. It's home to Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), which together give the city a creative, restless energy — you'll find galleries, experimental restaurants, and design studios crammed into the same Federal Hill blocks as century-old Italian bakeries and red-sauce joints.
The food scene is the city's most reliable draw. Federal Hill is New England's densest concentration of Italian-American cooking: Angelo's Civita Farnese on Atwells Avenue has been open since 1924, and the delis on the plaza hold their own against anything in Boston's North End. Downtown, a younger generation of chefs has pushed Providence onto national food media's radar with a wave of inventive, ingredient-focused restaurants.
WaterFire is the event Providence is known for beyond Rhode Island. On selected evenings from spring through autumn, nearly a hundred bonfires are lit on iron braziers floating on the three rivers that converge downtown. The effect — fire on dark water, gondoliers, crowds on both banks — is genuinely unlike anything else in the Northeast, and it's free. Check waterfirearts.org for the schedule.
The RISD Museum on Benefit Street is one of the strongest small art museums in New England, with particular depth in American decorative arts, textiles, and contemporary work. Brown University and the surrounding College Hill neighborhood are worth an afternoon: the architecture runs from colonial-era wood-frames to Beaux-Arts, and Thayer Street has the coffee shops and bookstores to match. The Providence Athenaeum on Benefit Street — a haunt of both Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft — is open to the public and worth ten minutes of anyone's time.
Providence is compact and walkable. The train station is a short walk from downtown, and Amtrak's Northeast Regional and Acela stop here, making it an easy day trip from New York (3 hrs) or Boston (45 min). The Rhode Island State House dome — one of the largest self-supporting marble domes in the world — is visible from much of the city.