But if you're making your first visit here, it's the museums you shouldn't miss.

The Museum of Fine Arts is a place designed to both stir and soothe the soul -- no matter what your idea of art. Spaces designed by architectural masters Mies van der Rohe and Rafael Moneo display a light tunnel by contemporary artist James Turrell, objects crafted from gold in Central Africa, the thought-provoking End Game sculpture by Damien Hirst, Old World portraits by Rembrandt and Memling. Nearby sculpture gardens and two house museums further afield can easily fill a weekend.

The Contemporary Arts Museum -- in the Houstonian way, just across the street from both impressive mansions and the Museum of Fine Arts -- tears at preconceived ideas with cutting-edge exhibitions like it's current show, Cinema Remixed & Reloaded: Black Women Artists and the Moving Image since 1970, which explores notions of beauty, sexuality, strength and identity.

A few minutes away by car lies the Menil campus, the remarkable center of art that is not only a showcase for artworks but a model for how to live with them. Unlike flamboyant museums like the Guggenheims in New York and Bilbao, the striking Calatrava-designed wing of the Milwaukee Art Museum or the palaces of the Louvre, Prado and Hermitage, the galleries of the main Menil and Twombly pavilions are undemanding, almost serene. The Byzantine Fresco Chapel is a simple-yet-sophisticated shell combining expressions of ancient with the contemporary.

But it is perhaps the Rothko Chapel that moves the spirit most. As you sit in silence contemplating 14 massive canvases by Mark Rothko -- Are they black? Gray? Aubergine? Solid or shadowed? -- you may find the buzz of daily woes replaced with a sense of quietude. For the religious and those not, the place transforms through the power of art -- and those who create it.

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