Boston

Put the map away and follow the red line set into the pavement. It strings together sixteen sites tied to the revolution over about four kilometres. Some stretches are laid in red brick and others painted, and the painted ones vanish under snow.

Set aside in 1634 as common pasture for cattle, it counts as the oldest city park in the country. Across one street, the Public Garden pond carries swan-shaped boats driven by foot pedals, and they only go in the water in the warm season.

A market below and a meeting room above, which is why the speeches before the revolution happened here. The weathervane on the cupola is a gilded grasshopper, up there since 1742 and never moved.

Built after a Venetian palazzo, its rooms wrap a courtyard. The founder's will forbids rearranging anything, so labels beside the paintings are scarce. In 1990 thieves cut out thirteen works and none has returned. The empty frames still hang where they were.

The ballpark opened in 1912 on an awkward lot, which is why the left field wall stands so high. Behind that green wall runs a passage where the scoreboard numbers are swapped by hand. A few old seats sit behind posts, with half the field hidden.

It sits over the river in Cambridge, a few stops further on the subway. The John Harvard statue carries three untruths: he founded nothing, the carved date is wrong, and the face was modelled on another student. Students joke about visitors touching the shoe.

Launched in 1797, the wooden warship is still on the navy list and serving sailors keep watch on her. Oak thick enough to bounce cannon shot earned her the nickname Old Ironsides. She is turned around from time to time so one side does not weather alone.

A narrow cobbled lane on Beacon Hill, lined with the houses coachmen and servants once lived in. Some window panes nearby have turned violet: manganese in glass imported two centuries ago changed colour under sunlight.

Grass and trees run the length of the bank, so runners and sailing dinghies share one frame. A shell-shaped outdoor stage stands along it, and on summer nights people sit on the grass to listen.

Raised on the hilltop in 1798, its dome is covered in gold leaf. It was wood first, then sheathed in copper supplied by Paul Revere's works. A carved wooden cod hangs in the House chamber, a reminder of the fishery that kept this state alive.

Opened in 1876, it holds one of the largest collections of Japanese art outside Japan. Before the Huntington Avenue entrance stands Appeal to the Great Spirit, a Native rider on horseback with both arms raised to the sky.

The old building on Copley Square opened in 1895. Bates Hall upstairs is a barrel-vaulted reading room lined with green-shaded lamps, open to any visitor free of charge. In the cloistered courtyard inside, the square's traffic fades out almost at once.

Harvard has tended this arboretum since 1872, and it forms one link in Olmsted's Emerald Necklace of parks. In May several hundred lilacs open at once and their scent drifts over the hill. Entry costs nothing.

An island in name only, it is now the tip of South Boston, joined to land by a causeway. The star-shaped granite Fort Independence stands on it, and over the path around the bay, jets bound for Logan skim past with their wheels down.

A ferry from Long Wharf reaches Georges Island in under an hour. Fort Warren, which held prisoners in the Civil War, covers most of the island, and you can walk its unlit powder-magazine passages by torchlight. Boats run only in the warm months.

The harbour town of the 1692 witch trials, under an hour from Boston's North Station by commuter rail. Inside the Peabody Essex Museum stands an old house from Anhui, China, taken apart and rebuilt. In October Halloween crowds pack even the train.