Florence City Guide by Taymoor Atighetchi

There's only fifteen rooms in the old Palazzo Ginori, once home to the porcelain family. Soft, calm, full of antiques and everything tastefully curated together. Ask for a first floor room, where the ceilings are frescoed, and help yourself from the honesty bar in the lounge.

Located on Via Maggio, over the river in the Oltrarno, this is in the quieter half of the city and the better half to sleep in. Betty Soldi and Matteo Perduca built it by layering vintage finds, salvaged furniture and their own artwork, under original frescoed ceilings, with roll top baths in the bedrooms.

A tiny cellar in an alley beside the Ponte Vecchio, a dozen tables, it's barely changed since 1945. Order the Groppa di Manzo: a rump of beautiful Florentine beef sliced thin, served rare with shaved pecorino, juniper, pink peppercorns and good oil. Don't bother to read the rest of the menu. It's the single most memorable thing I've ever eaten and I've never come close to recreating it at home no matter how many times I try.

Refined Tuscan cooking on Via di Santo Spirito, in a beautiful vaulted cellar with the walls lined floor to ceiling in bottles, brought down by the waiters on long sticks. Order the garganelli with tomato, courgette and red onion. It's so simple, there's almost nothing to it and it's better than anything more complicated on the menu.

White tablecloths, monogrammed plates, career waiters in white jackets who've been there decades. Florence is famous for its bistecca fiorentina, a huge T-bone of Chianina beef grilled over coals and served properly rare, and Cammillo's is as good as it gets. Order it for two, with the fried courgette flowers to start. This is true Florence.

In Santa Maria del Carmine, across the river. Masaccio's frescoes are where Renaissance painting properly begins, and his Expulsion from Eden is as raw as anything painted since. Entry is timed and the room is tiny, so make sure to book. Twenty minutes here will do more for you than three hours in the Uffizi.

A hidden jewel box that is off the tourist trail and not many people know about. It's a small private chapel painted wall to wall by Benozzo Gozzoli with the Procession of the Magi and the Medici themselves painted in among the retinue. Some of the most detailed and exceptional frescoes in the whole city are here, in a room you could cross in four steps.

If you go to one museum in Florence, go to this one. Donatello's penitent Mary Magdalene is carved from a single trunk of white poplar, gaunt and stripped of everything, and startling up close. Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise are here too, the ten gilded bronze panels that took him twenty seven years. What's on the Baptistery now is a copy. These are the originals, moved indoors and mounted where you can stand close enough to read them. Then Michelangelo's Bandini Pietà, begun in his seventies for his own tomb and abandoned unfinished. The hooded figure holding Christ is Michelangelo himself. It is the most human portrayal of death I know.