Berkshire Hills: Tanglewood, Norman Rockwell & Mass MoCA

The Boston Symphony Orchestra's summer home since 1937, on 524 acres of rolling lawns and mature trees above Stockbridge Bowl. The Koussevitzky Music Shed seats 5,000 under a permanent roof with an open back wall; the lawn holds another 10,000 on blankets and folding chairs. The BSO performs 12 weeks of summer programs; the Music Center trains 160 young professional musicians each summer in a program started by Leonard Bernstein.

The village of Lenox centers on the Church Street commercial strip, with independent restaurants, bookshops, and galleries housed in 19th-century brick buildings that served the Gilded Age estate owners who built their summer 'cottages' on the surrounding hills. The Mount — Edith Wharton's 1902 house — is a mile from town and open for tours.

Edith Wharton designed The Mount in 1902 applying the principles of her 1897 book The Decoration of Houses — the property includes a formal Italian garden, a French flower garden, and a New England rock garden that Wharton called 'the bones of the landscape.' Wharton lived at The Mount until 1911 and wrote Ethan Frome and The House of Mirth here; the house was restored after a period of abandonment.

The largest single collection of Norman Rockwell's original works, on 36 acres above the Housatonic River in Stockbridge. Rockwell lived and worked in Stockbridge for the last 25 years of his life; his studio has been moved to the museum grounds and preserved with his paints, easels, and reference library exactly as he left them. The museum holds 998 original paintings and drawings including the Four Freedoms series.

The largest contemporary art museum in the United States, occupying 26 connected mill buildings of the 19th-century Arnold Print Works complex in North Adams. The campus holds 250,000 square feet of gallery space — Gunnar Schonbeck's permanent sound installation, Sol LeWitt's largest wall drawing commission, and the James Turrell retrospective occupy buildings too large for any conventional museum. The campus itself is an outdoor sculpture park.

A North Adams restaurant in the former Hadley Overland Building adjacent to Mass MoCA, serving farm-to-table New England cuisine calibrated for the museum crowd. The lunch menu emphasizes local produce, Vermont cheese, and Berkshire pork; the cocktail program uses Berkshire Mountain Distillers spirits made in Great Barrington.

A private art collection opened to the public in 1955 in a 140-acre landscape designed by Tadao Ando, housing 70 Renoir paintings — the second-largest Renoir collection outside France — alongside significant holdings of Winslow Homer, Sargent, and the French Barbizon school. The Reflecting Pool and the woodland trails on the Clark property are as carefully considered as the collection itself.