I'm Christopher Leiden and this is open source.

On a hometown spree along the famous Fenway in the heart of Boston. Fenway Park is where the Red Sox play,

John Up Dyke's Lyric Little Band Box of a ballpark.

Fenway Court, built around the same time

just a few blocks away, is a jewel box, a treasure house of high art, an American

palazzo and museum like none other, a matching monument to Quirky Boston's eccentricity and its beauty.

Natalie Dykstra, we owe you for the new biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner who designed this Fenway court

inch by inch. She invented the magical space where proper old Boston got up close

and personal with the Italian Renaissance and does to this day.

Mrs Gardner made social history, art history, women's history on a grand scale, but there's

something more here.

We stand in the Titian room of her museum,

masterpieces on the walls by the giants.

Velazquez, Titian himself,

Barrichelli around the corner, but I'm feeling Mrs. Gardner too.

She had the authority of an Empress and a whole lot of money in assembling this art, one painting at a time.

Somehow the final effect is unpretentious, intimate, humble, democratic. Can you unpeel the feeling in this room like none other that I know?

What's to notice?

And where's to find Mrs. Gardner?

This is her grandest gallery and why she has it at the top of the third floor of three floors of galleries.

This is the so-called Titian room named after the great painter Titian. The Rape of Europa,

arguably the great masterpiece of her collection. The coup. The coup. It is the combination of alarm and sensuality. The colors are so vivid but delicate.

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