Meet the guide in the foyer of your hotel, or at an agreed meeting place, and step into the lively street life for which Melbourne is renowned.

Stroll down Degraves Street and Centre Place, and feel the vibrancy of the city's famous Laneway Culture.

Laneways were once service lanes – functional, but dark and dirty, and largely avoided unless you were delivering goods.

Now, in a complete transformation, laneways are the homes of restaurants and cafes, galleries and bars, and fashion and street art, all with a certain grit and charm.

Turn back time by luxuriating in the two nineteenth-century arcades.

By “arcade”, we refer to the original sense of the word, which is “two rows of small businesses under one roof”.

Wander through the Block Arcade and the Royal Arcade and feel a sense of opulence and nostalgia. Gain a sense of the boom times that occurred out of Melbourne after the extraordinary Gold Rush in the mid-nineteenth century.

Melbourne is one of the leading cities in the world for public transport. The trams – or trolleys, as they're called in some parts – clang their way down the middle of the main streets, and are free within the perimeter of the CBD.

Feel a lightness in your step when you get off the tram at the top of Bourke Street, within sight of the formidable Parliament House, which, when Melbourne was the capital city, was the focus of the nation.

At the top of Bourke Street, stoke your curiosity by ducking into one of the independent bookshops that were the among the reasons why Melbourne was named a World City of Literature, the second such city, behind only Edinburgh.

Or treat yourself by tucking into a bowl of pasta from the city's original pasta house, which, besides serving delicious lasagne and ravioli, put Melbourne on the road to becoming the nation's Coffee City by importing the first espresso machine.

From there, we have divergent options:

Head north along Crossley Street. Bask in the allure of Eurasian restaurants and cool bars, before walking down Chinatown.

Melbourne's Chinatown is one of the oldest in the Western World, and features high-end cuisine as well as dumpling houses. Treat yourself to a “Melbourne dumpling”, which includes a delicious combination of chicken and shrimp.

Or head south along Meyers Place, the original site of Melbourne's thriving bar scene, and delight in the sounds of patrons clinking glasses.

Proceed down Flinders Lane, once the home of what we called the “Rag Trade”, which was the term to describe the clothing and textile industry.

These days, Flinders Lane features a panoply of restaurants which describe themselves as “modern Australian”, which gives them the licence to draw influences from Europe, Asia and anywhere else. There is, however, no room to move on the requirement for fresh ingredients.

Other attractions include the mouth-watering morsels of Queen Victoria Market and the sumptuous grandeur of State Library Victoria, with its magnificent domed reading room.