Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840–1924) spent thirty years assembling one of the finest private art collections in America, then built a Venetian Gothic palace in Boston to house it exactly as she wanted it to be seen. The museum opened in 1903 and has changed almost nothing since Gardner's death — her will stipulated that no object could be moved or sold, on pain of selling the entire collection to Harvard and dispersing it.

The result is one of the most unusual and intimate museum experiences in the world — a 15th-century courtyard filled with flowers, surrounded by galleries packed floor-to-ceiling with Old Master paintings, ancient Roman sculptures, textiles, and rare books. The collection's greatest works include Titian's The Rape of Europa, Vermeer's The Concert, and works by Rembrandt, Raphael, Botticelli, and Sargent. In 1990, thirteen works were stolen in one night by two men posing as police officers — including the Vermeer and the Rembrandt — and have never been recovered. The empty frames still hang exactly where the paintings were.