Samuel (Mark Twain) and Olivia "Livy" Clemens commissioned their new home in Hartford in 1873 and moved in the following year. It was here that he wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and several others of his best-known works. The Victorian Gothic mansion is a National Historic Landmark.

The country's first municipal rose garden and third-largest in the United States, Elizabeth Park Rose Garden was named for Elizabeth Pond and planted on 102 acres donated to the city by her husband, Charles H. Pond, in 1903. Today, the garden contains more than 15,000 plants with 800 varieties of roses. These include old and new varieties of hybrid tea, climbers, hybrid perpetual, floribunda, shrub, and pillar roses.

This 37-acre park next to the Capitol grounds is America's first public park. It contains the Civil War Memorial, the Pump House Gallery, the Israel Putnam statue, and the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch. A 1914 Stein and Goldstein carousel with 48 hand-carved wooden horses and two chariots circling a Wurlitzer band organ is one of only three surviving Stein and Goldstein carousels in existence. Tours of the park are offered the second Saturday of the month, May through October, and tours of the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch are on Thursdays at noon, May through October.

The Wadsworth Atheneum is the oldest free public museum in the US, with more than 50,000 works of art in its impressive Gothic-style building. Major highlights of the European collection are Italian Baroque painting, with major works by Caravaggio, as well as the Surrealist artists, represented here in works by Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Max Ernst, and René Magritte. Works by Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir represent the Impressionists, and the museum continues its mission to support living artists by adding contemporary works to the collection regularly.

Decorative arts are a major focus, and among 7,000 objects in its European Decorative Arts collection are ancient glass and bronzes and an outstanding ceramics collection, especially of Meissen, Vincennes, and Sèvres ware.

Perhaps the most engaging room is the Cabinet of Art and Curiosity, a room inspired by the Victorian collectors who dedicated rooms to their collections of art, technology, and natural curiosities.

This hands-on museum has 168 exhibits with each section exploring some facet of the world around us. At Forces in Motion, you can make and test flying devices and at Invention Dimension, you can race robots and invent with Legos. With the interactive exhibits in Planet Earth, you'll feel hurricane-force winds and make your own weather forecasts. Others include Sight and Sound; Exploring Space; Picture of Health; Energy City; and River of Life, with a marine touch tank that examines Connecticut River and its creatures.

The first food hall in Connecticut. Parkville Market features over 15 different food stalls and a full bar, The Local, upstairs. Everything you could want to eat is right here in one place.