Narragansett Bay in Newport, Rhode Island, has been attracting visitors to its sheltered harbors and picturesque cliffs since the Gilded Age. The wealthiest built their lavish Rhode Island mansions from imported marble, fine wood and polished crystal. They gave dinner parties for dogs and draped their slumbering horses in satin sheets. They ate off solid gold dishes under glittering Baccarat chandeliers.
The great summer palaces of the Vanderbilts and Astors remain as inviting today as they were 100 years ago—only now you don't have to be among the New York 400 to get in. Anyone with the price of admission can enter these "cottages," as the robber barons called them, as well as Newport's impeccably preserved colonial-era buildings.
So take time to tour a mansion or two, but don't forget to enjoy the things that lured the high-society types to Newport in the first place: ocean breezes, sandy beaches and picturesque lighthouses that dot the rocky New England coastline. From its rough-and-tumble roots as a Navy town in the 1960s and '70s, the redeveloped Newport waterfront has groRead More ... wn into a sophisticated shopping and dining mecca. Today, Newport is a magnet for summer visitors seeking sun, sea and surf as well as romantics looking for a getaway in a seaside town that boasts of having more bed-and-breakfasts per capita than anywhere else in the U.S. Despite the loss of the America's Cup, Newport has not forgotten its nautical roots: It remains a port of call for weekend sailors and giant cruise ships alike, and the downtown wharves are the best place in Rhode Island for chartering a boat or joining a tour group to explore the wonders of Narragansett Bay.
< Show Less
