Rowing is a popular sport on the Charles River, which wends its way alongside the campuses of Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Los Angeles Times / CHRISTOPHER REYNOLDS

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — This country’s first college town is full of far more American history, smart shops, cool museums, inviting restaurants and all-around entertainment than your average city of 95,000 residents.

Harvard University sprawls on about 380 acres at one edge of Cambridge. Massachusetts Institute of Technology sits on 168 acres at another edge. The Charles River bends around both campuses, and the tree-lined streets are carpeted in fall leaves.

An out-of-towner easily could ignore Boston, just across the river, and spend days just digesting Cambridge. So I did, for three days in September, as thousands of students were settling in for the new term — about 1,700 freshmen at Harvard, 1,100 or so at MIT plus legions more at Lesley (also in Cambridge), Tufts (in Somerville, next door) and Boston University (just across the Charles). All told, greater Boston boasts about 50 college campuses.

But today’s short course is Cambridge 101, tuition-free.

1. Everyone has an opinion in Harvard Square, and everyone has an opinion on Harvard Square. Old-timers bemoan the real estate boom that banished much of the neighborhood’s Bohemian feel, but newcomers love bumping into big shots who were on CNN the night before. If you don’t spot a human statue in a blue leotard striking poses for tips or a PETA activist in a chicken suit, you’re looking too hard for Wolf Blitzer. 

Harvard Book Store (since 1932) is a great independent bookshop. Leavitt & Peirce (since 1885) still furnishes tobacco and “gentlemen’s accessories” (chess sets, for instance). And Out of Town News (1955), the magazine stand and paper peddler in the middle of it all, survived a closure scare in January and continues under new management.

You get folk music at Club Passim, jazz at Regattabar or Ryles Jazz Club, rock at the Middle East Restaurant & Nightclub near Central Square. On Wednesday, a wall notice announces, there’s a Queer Town Hall meeting. On Thursday, a Korean martial arts class. On Saturday, choral auditions.

2. If you can’t get out on the Charles, you should at least get over it. At the least hint of decent weather, the rowers and sailors of Cambridge take to the water. You can rent a vessel (Charles River Canoe & Kayak, www.paddleboston.com) and join them. Or walk or run or bike along the water’s edge. Or stand above the water on the Harvard-adjacent Weeks Foot Bridge and watch the world go by.

3. You can do Harvard for free, with or without snark. Founded in 1636, Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the U.S. The sticker price for undergrads is about $49,000 a year for tuition, room, board and incidentals, and the alumni include seven presidents. You’ll hear more along these lines on the official student-led Harvard tour. It’s free, lasts about an hour and I liked mine. But there’s competition.

Since 2006, Unofficial Tours has been offering unofficial “Hahvahd” tours, also led by students, who dish out more attitude and less reverence. (It was an Unofficial guide who reminded me that the Unabomber studied here.) Unofficial tours are nominally free, but guides suggest a tip of $10 per person.

4. Even if all the other tourists are touching the John Harvard statue’s toe, you shouldn’t. The 19th-century statue sits in the Old Yard, above an inscription that incorrectly credits John Harvard with founding the college in 1638. But generations of freshmen (whose dorms neighbor the yard) have made a tradition of mistreating the sculpture, often in, shall we say, the wee hours.

“I know things about this toe that would make your blood curdle,” said sophomore Gabrielle Guarracino, who leads Unofficial Tours.

5. You never know what you’re going to find inside those brick and stone buildings. That strange shrunken castle in the middle of Bow Street with the odd purple-and-yellow door and the leftover can of Pabst Blue Ribbon by the threshold? Headquarters of the Harvard Lampoon, where writers George Plimpton and John Updike, actor Fred Gwynne and comedian Conan O’Brien have honed punch lines.

6. Maybe men are losing their clout at Harvard. Or maybe not. Partly because it had all-female Radcliffe right next door, Harvard got away without admitting female students until 1977. But now the president’s office is occupied by Drew Gilpin Faust, the first female to land the job. And in 2008-09, women undergraduates narrowly outnumbered men, 3,363 to 3,315.

7. Near Harvard Square are two museums you shouldn’t miss. One, especially if you’re traveling with kids, is the Harvard Museum of Natural History. It’s chock-full of stuffed mammals, centipedes in jars, butterflies under glass, a 42-foot-long kronosaurus skeleton, and 3,000 uncannily convincing glass flowers, painstakingly made by a father-and-son team between 1887 and 1936.

The other mandatory stop is the Harvard Art Museum’s Sackler building. Because the campus Fogg and Reisinger museums will be under renovation for the next few years, curators have chosen favorite pieces from those collections and united them (often in witty combinations) in a greatest-hits art exhibit called Re-View.

8. George Washington slept here. For about nine months in 1775 and 1776, the Revolutionary War general bedded down at 105 Brattle St., near Harvard Square. About 70 years later, poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wound up living in the same home, which is open to the public as the Longfellow National Historic site.

9. MIT is worth a visit. The Cambridge campus, just a mile and a half southeast of Harvard on Mass Ave., dates to 1916, when the college moved across the river from Boston.

You couldn’t call MIT warm and fuzzy. On campus, most buildings are known by numbers instead of names, even the grand entrance, Building 7. And although MIT officials claim they operate only one nuclear reactor, half the structures on campus seem likely spots for boron neutron capture therapy or other nuclear chores.

Meanwhile, Frank Gehry’s towering, tilting Stata Center, completed in 2004, suggests a meltdown in progress. In a good way. There’s a cafe inside, along with colorful, oversized photos of striking scenes around the world.

The school (undergrad sticker price: $50,000 yearly) has seven Nobel Prize winners on its faculty, and alumni include astronaut Buzz Aldrin, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Tom Scholz, the Boston guitarist behind those killer power chords on that golden ’70s oldie “More Than a Feeling.”

10. If you have an extra 45 minutes, check out the MIT Museum. It’s no match for the art and natural history collections at Harvard, but it has a batch of clever devices (robots, holograms), along with a series of displays showing how brainy pranks have pervaded student culture for decades.

Once, in 1994, those wacky kids put a police car on the roof of the campus’ Great Dome. In 1982, an MIT fraternity crew inflated and harmlessly exploded a balloon on the 46-yard line of a Harvard-Yale football game. In 1998, the university’s home page was replaced by an announcement that the Walt Disney Co. had purchased MIT for $6.9 billion.If you go:

FROM PROVIDENCE: Probably the easiest of several approaches (The hardest? Study, study, study . . .) is I-95 north to I-90 (Mass Pike) east to Exit 18 (Cambridge). COLLEGE TOURS:

• During the school year, students usually offer free official tours at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. weekdays, 2 p.m. Saturdays. Tours shut down during winter break. Details: Harvard Events and Information Center, Holyoke Center Arcade, 1350 Massachusetts Ave.; (617) 495-1573, www.news.harvard.

edu/guide/to do.

• In September, October, March, April and May, Unofficial Tours offers its irreverent, pay-what-you-like Harvard tours at 10:45 a.m., 11:30 a.m., 12:30 p.m. and 1:30 p.m. Fridays through Mondays. Details: (617) 674-7788 or www.harvardtour.com.

• MIT’s free student tours, usually 75 to 90 minutes, are offered at 11 a.m. and 3 p.m., Mondays through Fridays, except during winter break (typically Dec. 15-Jan. 4) and federal holidays. Details: MIT Information Center, 77 Massachusetts Ave.; (617) 253-4795, web.mit.edu/infocenter/

campustours.html.

TO LEARN MORE:

Cambridge Office for Tourism, (617) 441-2884, www.cambridge-usa.org.

Harvard University, www.harvard.edu.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, www.mit.edu.

Harvard Square Business Association, (617) 491-3434, www.harvardsquare.

com.