Newport, Rhode Island – 5 July 2026

This morning is spent enjoying the ship with less people. Lots of excursions this morning, our’s is this afternoon – The Vanderbilt’s Newport. Surprisingly, I have been all over the world and never stopped in Newport, RI to see any of these National Historic sites. Today we will only see two mansions.

The weather is much cooler today and rainy. The temperatures are in the low 70’s. Nice! And our ship cannot dock in their harbor so we will be taking the Tender boats to the island of Newport dock.

As the ship arrives, you can easily see Fort Adams. It is one of the largest and most complex fortifications in the Western Hemisphere, with extensive land and sea defenses, established on July 4, 1799. Unfortunately, not able to visit this time, maybe next?

Taking the tender over to Newport, on this Sunday after the 4th, the boat traffic is crazy. Sailboats, yachts, powerboats, and catamarans are creating fairly choppy waters in the harbor and still there are hundreds of boats just moored.

Once at the dock, we line up for the bus excursions to take us to Marble House and The Breakers.

I won’t bore you with too much of the Newport history. It was founded in 1639 by a group of people fleeing Boston Puritans – so that gives you an idea – lots of history. Definitely, an interesting place, worth a vacation stop to explore and enjoy the cooler weather on the Atlantic Ocean. A short drive through Newport to Bellevue Avenue where the mansions of the ‘Gilded Age’ were built.

The bus takes us to our first stop – the Marble House built by William Vanderbilt, Cornelius’s brother. The grounds are lovely with the hydrangea’s blooming outside and in the back. Using a bit of Wikipedia for description: Marble House is a Gilded Age mansion built from 1888 to 1892 as a summer cottage for Alva and William Kissam Vanderbilt and was designed by Richard Morris Hunt in the Beaux Arts style. It was unparalleled in opulence for an American house when it was completed in 1892.^[2] Its temple-front portico has been compared to that of the White House.

This mansion was the original ‘summer cottage’ starting the other wealthy of the Gilded Age to begin building their summer cottages/mansions in Newport. Cornelius built The Breakers and it went on from there. The Gilded Age is apparently a show on HBO modeled after these mansions. I haven’t watched the show but I do remember the book/movie “The Great Gasby” in which some scenes were filmed in Newport.

The interior of the Marble House is as described – lots of marble and extreme opulence! You are able to follow tour signs through the various rooms the family lived in. All the rooms are labeled in case you aren’t sure what they were used for – the bedrooms are obvious!

The tour continues through a hallway and then down several stories of stairs to the kitchen. This reminds me of The Downtown Abbey series.

William Vanderbilt also had constructed a small tea room on the backside of the property on the cliff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. The view across the ocean is of several other Newport mansions.

Next stop – The Breakers. Wikipedia states it simply: This mansion is the most famous and opulent of Newport’s “summer cottages,” built between 1893 and 1895 as a summer residence for Cornelius Vanderbilt II and his wife, Alice Gwynne Vanderbilt. Designed by architect Richard Morris Hunt in the Neo Italian Renaissance style, it is a 70-room palazzo spanning 138,300 square feet of living space on five floors.

This past January I stayed at The Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach so I was curious about this mansion’s interior. While they are not exactly architecturally the same, there were a couple of ceiling styles that are similar in the mansion with the hotel (rebuilt in the 1920s) – Renaissance Revival (hotel) vs. Neo-Italian Renaissance with Renaissance Revival touches (mansion).

Need I use the word to describe this mansion of opulence again or maybe just overly lavishly furnished. We are allowed to explore several rooms of the mansion on the walk-thru tour.