Providence: where fire dances on the river

The campus of Brown University, founded in 1764, extends on a hill dotted with red brick buildings among the oldest in the United States.

Descending towards downtown, you walk through the Benefit Street Historic District, considered one of the stretches with more original colonial buildings in all of America.

Continuing on, you reach the Rhode Island State House, with its white marble dome among the largest unsupported in the world.

On WaterFire evenings, dozens of braziers lit on the surface of the three city rivers transform the downtown into a path of fire, music, and the scent of burning wood, followed on foot by thousands of visitors.

WaterFire, conceived by artist Barnaby Evans in 1994, has become one of Providence's most distinctive public events, drawing tens of thousands of people in a single evening.

Benefit Street preserves so many original colonial houses that architectural historians consider it a uniquely rare case of urban preservation in the United States.