Museum of Fine Arts

465 Huntington Avenue, 617-267-9300
Where Boston Common is always snow-covered as the sun fades in Hassam’s painting, which hangs in the Art of the Americas gallery on the first floor. The museum has strong collections of Asian and American works, portraits and landscapes by John Singer Sargent and a collection of silver teapots by Paul Revere. On weekends, there are screenings of foreign and classic films.

Ice Skating @ Boston Common’s Frog Pond

Boston Common is the first gem in the city’s so-called Emerald Necklace, a series of linked green spaces. Come November, the Frog Pond (on the Beacon Street side of the Common, 617-635-2120) fills with ice skaters. The rink makes its own ice, so skaters can glide even in relatively balmy temperatures (admission is $3 for adults; skate rental, $7).

If the ice seems too crowded, pause for a moment to gaze at the Common from Boylston and Tremont Streets: the gauzy, lamplight scene inspired Childe Hassam’s ”Boston Common at Twilight,” which you can catch indoors at the Museum of Fine Arts the next morning.

Mapparium at the Mary Baker Eddy Library

At the Mapparium at the Mary Baker Eddy Library, 200 Massachusetts Avenue, (888) 222-3711, www.marybakereddylibrary.org, visitors traverse a 30-foot glass bridge, surrounded by hundreds of brightly colored glass panels depicting the world as it was in 1935.
Children can stand on one side while parents whisper from the other, and you will all learn how sound travels inside a glass sphere. Admission $5, students $3, younger than 6 free. Closed Monday.

Boston Public Garden’s Swan Boats

The famous Swan Boats in the Public Garden, www.swanboats.com ($2.50; age 2 to 15, $1), offer another peaceful interlude. While parents sit back for the 15-minute figure-eight cruise around the lagoon (including an island where the ducks lived in the book “Make Way for Ducklings”), children will be quietly intrigued by the driver pedaling away, bicyclelike, behind the swan in the back of the boat.

M.I.T. Museum Main Gallery

M.I.T. Museum Main Gallery
265 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, (617) 253-4444
web.mit.edu/museum
($5; age 5 to 18, $2; closed Monday), you’ll find robots, 3-D holograms, including one of the remains of a 2,000-year-old man discovered in a bog in England, and an exhibition of photographs that capture instants in time like when a bullet explodes through an apple.

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

The Museum of Fine Arts is Boston’s grand museum, but the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum around the corner, at 280 The Fenway, www.gardnermuseum.org, (617) 278-5156, is Boston’s jewel.
In the late 19th century Mrs. Gardner and her husband traveled the world collecting art. Their home, built in the style of a 15th-century Venetian palace, houses great works from Europe, Asia, and the Middle East along with Mrs. Gardiner’s eccentric personal touches like a moonstone covering a lock of Robert Browning’s hair.

The eccentric Venetian-style palazzo built about a century ago that is crammed with 2,500 of Mrs. Gardner’s acquisitions. Her will warns that if the permanent collection is disturbed, it will be given to Harvard; that partly explains the empty frames of two Rembrandts and a Vermeer taken along with other pieces in a 1990 robbery that is unsolved. Consider buying the $4 audio guide or $16 paperback guide because much of the collection is unlabeled.

Visitors with the name Isabella are admitted free; everyone else pays $10.

SoWa Artswalk

SoWa, a strip of blocks south of Washington Street, is where you’ll find Boston’s emerging artists. Try both the 450 Harrison Building and the artists’ studios at 500 Harrison Avenue, which is open to the public on the first Friday of each month all summer. (Check for times at www.sowaartwalk.com.)
The city’s art scene has shifted to Harrison from Newbury Street, says Bernard Toale, whose Toale Gallery has been at 450 Harrison since 1992 (617-482-2477; www.bernardtoalegallery.com).

“The art and the clientele in the South End is younger and funkier,” he says. “First Fridays are big happening scenes, with a younger, urban, new South End crowd. I’ve been around a long time, but I’d say the South End is made up of a lot of younger galleries showing newer artists, and not just local artists.”

Cyclorama @ Boston Center for the Arts

Cyclorama @ Boston Center for the Arts
539 Tremont Street, 617-426-5000
www.bcaonline.org

Catch an avant-garde art exhibition or a contemporary play at the Cyclorama. This 23,000-square-foot rotunda is part of the Boston Center for the Arts, and also offers a range of community events and is home to the Community Music Center of Boston, the Boston Ballet Costume Shop, three small theaters and a rehearsal studio.

Brownstones By Bicycle or Foot

Stretch your post-trip legs by walking around and checking out the striking brownstones. Boston’s South End has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places as having the largest Victorian brick-row-house district in the United States (www.southendhistoricalsociety.org).

Boston Convention and Exhibition Center

Boston Convention and Exhibition Center
415 Summer Street, 617-954-2000
www.mccahome.com
The 1.6 million-square-foot convention and exhibition center was designed by Rafael Viñoly. It has become a magnet for developers. Old industrial buildings in the surrounding blocks are being turned into office buildings and condos. There are even plans for a luxury hotel.

Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA)

Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston
100 Northern Avenue, 617-478-3101
www.icaboston.org
ICA is a visionary glass box designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro that cantilevers over the waterfront, the neighborhood is finally emerging as a vibrant arts district, with destination restaurants, green parks and condos.

As Boston’s first new art museum in decades, the I.C.A. is already a cultural cornerstone, with rotating exhibitions and a permanent collection with works by Nan Goldin, Cornelia Parker and Julian Opie.

Visitors can dine at its Water Cafe (run by Wolfgang Puck Catering), and the adjacent plaza merges with the newly expanded Boston HarborWalk, designed to reconnect the harbor to the rest of the city (though immediately surrounding the museum itself are a number of vast parking lots).

Harvard Book Store

1256 Massachusetts Avenue | Cambridge, MA 02138
www.harvard.com

In tweedy Cambridge, there is no better place to get lost than the aisles of Harvard Book Store, just off Harvard Square. It’s 75 years old and packed with titles familiar and unknown.

There are separate sections for philosophy, cultural and critical theory and politics, as well as a vast fiction collection. Most customers are quietly engrossed, but you may encounter a conversation or two worth eavesdropping on.