It would be difficult to map the quaintest Massachusetts towns near Boston without including Great Barrington.

The Berkshires redoubt of about 7,100 topped a 2012 Smithsonian magazine list of the 20 best small towns in America.

It is kind of a perfectly freakish area to soak up such a vibe, complete with a dash of mountainous hipness, too.

There are plenty of eateries, especially along Railroad Street, and lots of history (and historical properties) stretching back to Colonial times.

There is also the Guthrie Center, dedicated to folk music and named for native son Arlo Guthrie, and proximity to decent skiing during the colder months.

This Berkshires town of barely 2,000 year-round residents is so darn quaint it hosts the Norman Rockwell Museum, which contains the world’s biggest collection of the late Stockbridge resident’s art.

Rockwell often used the charming ‘burg as the setting for his paintings and illustrations of idyllic small-town life.

Tiny in size, bucolic in setting, and tucked near the New York border, you will feel eons away from Boston.

Yes, the town of roughly 40,000 is home to Amherst College, UMass-Amherst, and Hampshire College, but there’s lots to take in even if you’re not a student.

Check out some notable museums, including the Yiddish Book Center, which preserves more than a million volumes of Yiddish books and films; the Emily Dickinson Museum, dedicated to the town’s most famous native; and the kid-friendly Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art.

Or, just hit the college bars downtown.

No, not the university. The Town of Harvard is about an hour’s drive from the Cambridge university of the same name.

It has about 6,500 residents and has been the home in the past to several nontraditional communities, including various communes, the Shakers, and the Transcendentalists.

The Fruitlands Museum complex in Harvard includes the nation’s oldest Shaker museum as well as a museum dedicated to Native American artifacts and a farmhouse preserving a mid-19th-century experiment in communal living.

The downtown is also achingly quaint.

Concord has about 18,000 people and lots of reminders of its hosting some of the first shots of the Revolutionary War in April 1775, including the Minute Man National Historic Park.

The downtown is gorgeous, too, and there is a rich literary pedigree throughout: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, and Nathaniel Hawthorne all called Concord home at one point. (They still do, in fact.)

Of course one has to hit Lexington. It was here in April 1775 that the shots heard ‘round the world launched the American Revolution, and the town of 31,000-plus does not let visitors forget that fact.

There’s the Battle Green, or Common, which commemorates the Battle of Lexington and includes the nation’s oldest war monument.

There are also museums such as the Buckman and Munroe taverns dedicated to commemorating the conflict.

Yup, witches: Much of the city of approximately 40,000 people less than 45 minutes from Boston is bound up in the early 1690s hysteria that resulted in several executions for witchery.

The funnest time to visit Salem, then, is during the weeks leading up to Halloween.

But the city does offer other, non-witch-trial attractions, including the famed Peabody Essex Museum, dedicated to Asian art and early American maritime trading, and the Pioneer Village, a recreation of a Puritan community.

The town of about 18,000 is an hour from Boston by car or commuter rail.

Its coastal location, right where the Merrimack River meets the sea, provides copious amounts of waterside public space.

Visitors should also check out the Federal-style houses along High Street and the shopping along State Street.

This one’s for the sailors and the kayakers out there.

Marblehead, a town of about 20,000 souls less than an hour north of Boston, is famed for its yachting, sailing, kayaking, etc.

It’s often called the birthplace of the American Navy because a resident of the town launched what was likely the first fighting vessel during the Revolutionary War.

Strike up a debate on the subject when you’re in Marblehead—Beverly, Massachusetts, also claims the honor because the ship launched from its harbor.