Dublin for The Romantics: a Friday-to-Monday weekend

The Guinness family's private garden, hidden behind the National Concert Hall: a rosarium, a sunken maze, and a cascade that nobody photographs.

A Victorian grocer's shop Joyce named in Ulysses, now a dining room with the old mahogany counter kept; eat early and slowly before the theatre.

Yeats and Lady Gregory's national theatre, rebuilt plainly after the 1951 fire; the Peacock studio downstairs stages the stranger work.

Richard Turner's curvilinear glasshouse of 1848 and the palm house beside it, free and warm on a grey morning; the river walk is the quiet end.

Ireland's first public library, 1707, with the wired reading cages where scholars were locked in with the rare books and oak shelves still ordered by Archbishop Marsh himself.

In the basement of a Georgian townhouse on the square's quiet side, Mickael Viljanen's tasting menu is the slowest and most deliberate evening in the city.

Sixty-five metres of barrel vault over two hundred thousand of the oldest books; go at opening before the gallery fills and the smell of leather is still winning.

Copy number one of Ulysses, Joyce's notebooks, and the garden where the Jesuits taught him, in the house where he took his degree.

Upstairs from the bookshop, with the Ha'penny Bridge in the window and a menu of Irish smoked fish, soda bread, and Wicklow lamb by candlelight.

Wilde reclines on his rock opposite the house he grew up in at number one; the doors along the east side are the reason the Georgian fanlight is famous.

The chemist's where Bloom bought his lemon soap, kept exactly as it was by volunteers who will read you a page of Ulysses and sell you the soap.

Coffee and a sticky bun under the six Harry Clarke stained-glass windows, the same room where the city has been saying goodbye since 1927.