The mansions of Newport Rhode Island – the luxurious summer retreats of the super rich of the ‘Gilded Age’ and quaintly referred to as ‘cottages’. Amazingly, many of these summer houses were only lived in for six to eight weeks a year.
A quick recap, the ‘Gilded Age’ was a term coined by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in the late 19th century, satirising the greed and corruption of the governing class and the dazzling wealth accumulated by the likes of the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers and Carnegies.
