The Cloisters at the Top of Manhattan

A train to 190th, walk through Fort Tryon Park — winding paths, stone walls, Hudson River views that look borrowed from the Rhine. The museum is a medieval monastery assembled from five French cloisters, shipped to New York by Rockefeller in the 1930s, rebuilt on a bluff with the conviction that a city needs one place the 21st century can't reach.

The Unicorn Tapestries — seven panels from the late 15th century. Millefleur backgrounds, the unicorn's white body, the red of pomegranates. Colors so vivid after 500 years the dyes seem to have made a deal with time. The cloisters themselves are open courtyards with medieval herb gardens — the Cuxa Cloister has pink marble columns from a 12th-century French abbey, and sitting in its garden produces a silence Manhattan doesn't normally allow.

The Treasury in the lowest level: reliquaries, enameled crosses, a book of hours with paintings smaller than a postage stamp and more detailed than most full-sized canvases. The room is dim, cases lit from within, like looking into a world that took beauty so seriously it made it the size of a prayer.