Museum of Fine Arts

If the fine arts are your jam, you'll swoon for the paintings, sculptures and tapestries at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and the more than 450,000 works of art at the nearby, sprawling Museum of Fine Arts. More targeted (though no less impressive) institutions include the Institute of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Science, the Boston Children's Museum and the ever-popular, fish-filled New England Aquarium. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston is one of the largest museums in the United States, housing the second-largest permanent museum collection in the Western Hemisphere. The museum is affiliated with the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and a partner museum, the Nagoya/Boston Museum of Fine Arts, in Nagoya, Japan. The Museum of Fine Arts offers a wonderful permanent collection of works by American painting masters, as well as a wide selection of artworks from all important periods; it also hosts special exhibitions borrowed from around the world.