Traveling through the most cultural Boston | The traveler

This city in the State of Massachusetts is full of this type of small literary stories, like the one in this park, one of the oldest in the United States, since it dates back to 1634. Its famous university, Harvard, located in the adjacent town of Cambridge and Founded two years later, it would see Emerson himself give a lecture for the graduates of the Faculty of Divinity that would anger the conservative members of the institution for presenting another way of conceiving Christianity, looking Jesus face to face and far from pulpits and doctrines . Today, a plaque in the chapel where he spoke his words recalls that July 15, 1838, key to what would become the transcendentalist movement.

The great Bostonian philosopher, who settled in the nearby town of Concord from a young age, would have time to get to know — he died in 1882 — the Museum of Fine Arts, opened in 1876, whose structure and façade are reminiscent of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. In fact, it contains the second largest American permanent collection behind the MET, also built in the same decade. This Museum of Fine Arts in Boston is magnificent and diverse, with incredible Egyptian antiquities, a special collection of Japanese ceramics and many others that include European decorative arts from the Middle Ages to 1950, plus a host of great works by authors such as El Greco, Velázquez or Rembrandt, of French Impressionists and American painters of the 18th and 19th centuries such as Singleton Copley or John Singer Sargent.

Such an experience, precious for the visitor, can be completed with a visit to the nearby Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, which houses some 2,500 European, Asian and American works and was created at the initiative of a patron of the nineteenth century; Paintings by Vermeer or Manet were lost due to a theft in 1990, still unsolved, but it is possible to enjoy here the enormous The kidnapping of Europe, by Titian, among other masterful paintings. There is also another highly recommended museum in the city: the Institute of Contemporary Art, a fabulous building by the architecture studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro that houses exhibition halls, a bookstore, a theater and a restaurant.

Between books and concerts

In addition to the opportunity to enter artistic terrain, the traveler will be able to enter the Science Museum, next to the Charles River, with a planetarium and a theater that has a tremendous screen in IMAX format. In addition, a zoo awaits in the city that houses a hundred creatures that have been rescued from different dangerous situations; its origin is found in 1830, by the Boston Society of Natural History. It was the stage in which the United States was looking for its identity, already detached from British rule, and that it was going to see the construction of buildings as beautiful as the public library, in 1848, with a spectacular main reading room.

It was the first large municipal library in the country, and can be accessed for free. You won’t regret it if you step foot in its halls and see its paintings or its interior garden patio. It is in a square next to the church of the Trinity, of the so-called Romanesque richardsoniano (name taken from the American architect Henry Hobson Richardson) that developed as a variant of neo-romantic architecture. The library, among the largest in the country with that of Congress, in Washington, and that of Harvard, has some 15 million books, 600,000 photographs and 350,000 old maps, and was designed by Rafael Guastavino, who emigrated in 1887 from Valencia and who had patented a tile arch system with which he was successful in many places in North America.

This cultural day between museums and libraries can continue with another very particular site: the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, cradle of the original papers and correspondence of the Administration of the 35th White House guest.

And, at the end of the day, what better for the music-loving tourist than sitting down to listen to good music, continuing in buildings erected in the nineteenth century, such as the Boston Music Hall, from 1852, which would be the headquarters of the Symphony Orchestra at the end of the century. from Boston. In 1906 it was renamed the Orpheum Theater and today it is a benchmark for live music by many soloists and groups of different styles. We also have the well-known Boston Pops Orchestra, which was founded in 1885 to tackle both classical music and musical theater hits; his records, in their day, were the best-selling in the world in their genre. To all this should be added the Boston Symphony Orchestra, born in 1881, whose concert hall is the Symphony Hall and is considered one of the five most important in the world.

In any case, whether the city has already been known or not, you can return always to Boston reading one of its most famous authors, honored with the statue Poe Returning to Boston, in the Edgar Allan Poe Square, in a corner of the Common; the same park where there is another work entitled Learningwith a young man sitting reading a book, symbolizing the permanent desire to train and learn.

Toni Montesinos is the author of ‘Kafka’s K Offensive. A sacred and pure writer’ (Baltica, 2021).