Rhode Island
Discover Rhode Island
Introduction
Rhode Island is the smallest state in the country — about 48 miles by 37 — and almost all of it is within half an hour of salt water.
The state is really a bay with land around it. Narragansett Bay cuts thirty miles inland and splits it into a mainland, a scatter of islands and a long southern shore, giving a state of 1,200 square miles some 400 miles of coastline.
Its two poles are unlike each other. Newport holds the greatest concentration of Gilded Age mansions in America, built as summer houses by families who wanted to be seen; Providence is a working small city with an art school, a good restaurant scene and a dense, walkable centre.
It was founded in 1636 by a man banished from Massachusetts for arguing that the state had no business dictating belief, and that origin still shapes how the place sees itself.