Dylan swore he would never return to Newport, but after 37 years he was finally wooed back to top the folk festival bill. Wearing a wig, a false beard and a white Stetson, Dylan switched between acoustic and electric guitar. This time, the Newport audience cheered him.Newport’s reputation as the playground of the rich goes back to the 18th century when wealthy southerners escaped stifling summers to enjoy Rhode Island’s cool Atlantic breezes. After the Civil War it was New York’s industrial magnates who turned Newport into the most fashionable and ostentatious resort in the country.

The steamboat journey from New York to Newport conveniently took only one dayThe tycoons competed to build the most palatial and expensive mansions, which they called “summer cottages”. The Newport Preservation Society now owns 11 and you can tour these carefully restored monuments to “conspicuous consumption”. That was the phrase coined by the economist Thorstein Veblen specifically to describe Newport’s astonishing display of extravagance at the turn of the century.I walked along luxurious Bellevue Avenue, which has a strong aroma of serious money and is lined with mansions that were built in Newport’s Gilded Age, as Mark Twain dubbed the period.Kingscote, the oldest “cottage”, was my first stop. It has a modest gothic revival exterior but inside is Newport eclectic. The rooms are filled with Chinese porcelain, Venetian paintings, Delftware, William Morris wallpaper, Siena marble, a cork-tiled ceiling and a dining-room wall made of Tiffany glass tiles.But compared with The Elms, Kingscote is a bungalow. Edward Berwind, a coal millionaire, wanted his mansion to be a faithful copy of an 18th-century French chateau.

This is what he got, complete with a Louis XV-style ballroom, a marble staircase, Venetian paintings, Chippendale furniture and a 10-acre garden. Berwind even constructed his own elaborate underground railway for The Elms, discreetly bringing in coal to heat the property.Even more sumptuous is The Breakers, Cornelius Vanderbilt II’s 70-room mansion overlooking the Atlantic. Complete rooms were designed and built in Europe and transported to Newport along with sculptures and art treasures. The shipping and railroad tycoon modelled his summer retreat on an Italian Renaissance palace, filling it with rare French and Italian marble, mosaics, painted ceilings, Flemish tapestries, Baccarat chandeliers and gilded panelling. In a nice touch of oneupmanship the bathroom taps offered a choice of hot and cold fresh rainwater or saltwater pumped up from the ocean.Vanderbilt had three times more cash than the US government and used to lend money to the treasury when it was hard up. His brother William chose a pastiche of the Petit Trianon at Versailles for his own mansion.

Determined to dazzle the opposition, he told his architect to design “the best living accommodation that money could buy”. The result was an $11m “cottage” in 1892 called Marble House. Despite the luxury, most of these mansions were occupied for only six weeks a year.For $30 (£18), the Gilded Age Experience ticket admits you to a tour of five mansions. An alternative way to see the exteriors and gardens is to take the Cliff Walk and not pay a cent.