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Rhode Island's smallest state packs an outsized amount of American history into its coastline, and Newport sits at the most storied stretch of it. Perched on Aquidneck Island where Narragansett Bay meets the Atlantic, the city earned its reputation across several distinct eras: as a colonial-era port that rivalled Boston and New York in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as the summer capital of Gilded Age excess in the late nineteenth century, and as a sailing mecca whose waters have hosted the America's Cup more times than any other venue on earth. Those layers do not cancel each other out. They accumulate, and walking Newport means moving between them almost without noticing.

The waterfront along Thames Street and Bowen's Wharf draws most first-time visitors instinctively, and it earns the attention. Schooners and working boats share the harbour with pleasure craft, and the colonial streetscape behind the wharves remains largely intact, with the White Horse Tavern, reputedly the oldest operating tavern in the United States, still serving on Marlborough Street. Further up the hill, the Touro Synagogue, completed in 1763, stands as the oldest surviving synagogue in North America and a quiet reminder that Newport's colonial tolerance attracted communities that found few other footholds in early America.