First stop: John’s Pizzeria (278 Bleeker St.) Baked in a coal-fired brick oven, it really is the world’s best thin crust. John’s is two small rooms; a line trails down Bleeker Street most evenings. Go for lunch.

Next: The Morgan Library & Museum (225 Madison Ave.) for “Pages of Gold,” art cut from medieval manuscripts (through Sept. 13). Exquisitely illustrated scenes from the lives of the saints, often in gold. Many look like intricately woven tapestries. Also at the Morgan: “Acquisitions Since 2004,” a thrilling hodgepodge of letters, manuscripts, drawings, watercolors (through Oct. 18). Among the treasures: a handwritten manuscript of Oscar Wilde’s “The Selfish Giant,” a Beethoven score (messy!), an Arthur Getz inked-up notebook opened to ideas for Fourth of July cover art.

During a short film about the Morgan’s history, this question was raised: Why collect, preserve, display original works on paper? Because they’ve been touched by the artist’s hand. (www.themorgan.org)

The next day we dined on croissants from City Bakery, (3 West 18th St.) Who says New Yorkers are rude? The clerk made sure our croissants were hot from the oven, instead of the ones already cooled.

More art, though not what I’d planned. I wanted my 10-year-old daughter to experience the Guggenheim Museum (1071 Fifth Ave.) inside and out. (www.guggenheim.org)

She did, sort of: a show devoted to Frank Lloyd Wright’s work — mostly architectural renderings, on paper — hogged the curlicue hallway and many adjoining galleries (through Aug. 23). As Alex said later in the day: “It’s better to go see the Robie House, or one of his other buildings, because then you’re in it and you understand why he built it that way.”

Day three (prosciutto and fresh mozzarella panini, ingredients from Zabar’s, 2245 Broadway) trumped all others: my sister insisted we go to the Neue Galerie (1048 Fifth Ave.) to see its collection of German and Austrian art and crafts, and its prized possession: Gustav Klimt’s “Adele Bloch-Bauer 1” (1907).

Regardless of the work’s rich backstory, standing in front of this portrait gave me the chills. A daring composition, I was awed by its scale, kaleidoscopic imagery, and beauty. It’s the Mona Lisa of its time. See it. (www.neuegalerie.com)

When we returned home to Chicago, she pressed a fresh copy into my hands. So slender! A handsome cover, a mere 70 pages, now dog-eared and double-dogged by me, marked pages that hold a word or phrase or truism to be revisited.

How could a thin book be so rich?

Doty nabbed me on the first page, with his hurly-burly description of a part of Manhattan I know well. On the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, pigeons are a gang, and even in the sharp cold people huddle in groups, eating hot pretzels, sipping warm coffee, smoking. He, too, is cold and weary, his back hurts. Why is he there?

. “…I have fallen in love with a painting.”

It is a small painting, the size of school boy’s notebook, by Jan Davidsz de Heem (1606-1684). Its subject is the everyday, captured: oysters, a peeled lemon, green grapes, a glass of wine. Objects on the brink of time, Doty writes. To look at them, and look at them again and again, to be pulled into a painting, is a kind of love, he says, an intimacy.

And intimacy, he argues, is the finest human condition: to be separate, but also connected.

Doty is a poet; his language is lush. The book is both a meditation and a memoir: he takes us into the homes of his childhood, into the first home he owns and where his lover dies, and to Amsterdam for — you guessed it — a museum’s blockbuster show on Dutch still lifes.

At times I had to put this book down: it was too much, too filling. But it is a balm; its language and subject elevates. it would be the perfect book to keep in your bag, taken out and savored when you’re stuck at an airport, or riding an over-peopled bus. www.markdoty.org