There’s a moment on the Cliff Walk — maybe twenty minutes in, when the path narrows and the Atlantic opens up on your right and the back lawns of the Vanderbilt mansions stretch out on your left — when Newport stops being a place you’re visiting and becomes something you’re trying to understand. The scale of it doesn’t make sense at first. These were called cottages. The Breakers, Cornelius Vanderbilt II’s 70-room Italian Renaissance palazzo, built in 1895 with hydraulic elevators, hot and cold seawater taps in every bathroom, and a Great Hall that rises two stories under a painted ceiling — that was his summer cottage. He used it for six weeks a year.
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