Wandering through her neo-renaissance Florentine palazzo, you can’t help wishing you’d been invited to one of Isabella Stewart Gardner’s soirees. To say she was a character doesn’t do her justice; she defied all the blue-blood Brahmin conventions of the proper Boston matrons whose eyebrows she frequently raised (she liked wearing a pair of her largest diamonds bobbling on gold springs atop her head, like giant bug antennae). As a collector, her taste was sublime and her resources bottomless. Nothing in the priceless collections – or the palazzo she built to house them – can be changed at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, so what you see is the home where she lived and entertained the day’s leading artists and musicians. The only changes are the empty frames that held the Vermeer, Manet, three Rembrandt and five Degas works stolen in 1990, in one of the world’s most notorious art heists. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum highlights Gardner’s eclectic taste in decorating, using everything from Roman sarcophagi and Medieval stained glass windows to a pastel drawing by Whistler. Titian’s Europa is generally acknowledged – even by other museums – as the most important artwork in Boston. Concerts in the atrium feature chamber music by known and emerging musicians, and the stylish café is where the ladies-who-lunch meet. If your name is Isabella, you get into the museum free, for life. Yep, she was idiosyncratic.