Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The MFA began in 1870, when a group of Boston leaders set out to build a public art museum for the city, using the art already gathered by the Boston Athenaeum library as its starting seed. Six years later, on July 4, 1876, it opened its doors in a red-brick building on Copley Square, timed to the country's centennial celebration. Boston was booming, its universities and industries flush, and the museum grew fast on gifts from the city's wealthy families.

By 1909 the collection had outgrown Copley Square, and the museum moved to its present home on Huntington Avenue in the Fenway, a dignified stone building that has been added to ever since. The most striking modern addition is the Art of the Americas wing, opened in 2010, whose bright glass courtyard has become one of the most photographed spaces in the building.

Ask a first-time visitor what to see and the answer is usually the Impressionists. The MFA's Monet holdings are the largest outside of France, thanks in large part to early Boston collectors who bought his work when it was still controversial, and the museum's rooms of Monet, Renoir, and Degas draw crowds year round. Nearby hang colonial and nineteenth-century American masterpieces, from John Singleton Copley portraits to landscapes of a growing country, in what is considered the finest such collection anywhere.

The other jewel is ancient Egypt. Much of it came from decades of joint archaeological expeditions the museum ran with Harvard in the early twentieth century, which means many of the mummies, jewelry, and monumental statues were excavated by the MFA's own teams rather than simply bought. The result is one of the most important Egyptian collections in the world, with special strength in the earliest dynasties of the Old Kingdom.

What makes a stop at the MFA feel bigger than a single museum is how far its collection reaches. It holds one of the largest gatherings of Japanese woodblock prints outside Japan, a deep collection of Asian art stretching back thousands of years, European Old Masters, contemporary galleries, textiles, furniture, and musical instruments. Its total holdings run to roughly half a million objects, and it ranks among the largest art museums in the world by gallery space.

For a traveler, that breadth is the point. You can spend a rainy afternoon crossing continents and centuries without ever leaving the building, and still know you only scratched the surface. It is the kind of place that rewards a return visit and makes a strong anchor for a day in the Fenway.

The museum sits on Huntington Avenue in the Fenway, easily reached by Boston's subway, which has its own stop right at the door, a far simpler option than parking a car downtown. Give yourself at least half a day, and rather than trying to see all hundred-plus galleries, choose two or three wings that interest you most and slow down.

The building has restaurants and cafes, a courtyard to rest in, and a well-stocked shop, and certain evenings offer reduced or by-donation admission that is worth planning around. Just outside, the Back Bay Fens, Symphony Hall, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum are all within an easy walk, making the MFA the natural centerpiece of a cultural day in the city.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.