(MONEY Magazine) – To many Americans, guidebooks are the sine qua non of European travel. We're staunchly independent and often unwilling to learn the language--so we're not about to ask questions. And yet, we yearn to discover the secrets of the Old World, its stories, its flavors, its uncanny authenticity. So we walk the ancient streets of the Continent with our heads in a book--and the $15 to $25 we spend for the guide takes on a disproportionate weight in determining how good a trip we have. The least we should do, therefore, is make sure we have the right book. So we asked three people who are intimately familiar with three major European travel destinations--Benedict Nightingale, chief theater critic for the Times of London; Adam Gopnik, Paris-based writer for the New Yorker; and Alessandra Stanley, Rome bureau chief of the New York Times--to select their favorites from among the most popular guides to the cities they know. Here's what they found:

LONDON by Benedict Nightingale

"When two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather," declares the mostly non-idiotic Idiot's Guide to London. Not quite. Wherever Londoners gather now, they obsessively complain first about transport, next about prices. There's much talk of "rip-off Britain," where it's hard to find a good meal for two under $80, and even more about congested streets and a subway, or "tube," that charges you excessive sums yet persistently malfunctions. Is there a London guidebook that doesn't gloss over such complaints, pointing you at what's both good and true in this vast, crowded, fascinatingly diverse metropolis? A tall order, but two, Lonely Planet's London and the Michelin Green Guide to London, come close.

Where other guides are still claiming that London's "fast, convenient" system is "a delight to ride," Lonely Planet speaks for millions of angry Londoners when it calls the tube "slow, unreliable" and "terribly expensive." It is also, I fear, in touch when it says London's prices are generally "horrific," its people ruder than they once were, the area around its huge South Bank arts complex unpleasant and the central but gaudy Leicester Square a "lowlight."

Yet, rightly, it finds plenty to celebrate in succinct detail: the 2 1/2 miles of the British Museum's exhibits, St. Paul's Cathedral, St. James's Park, a boat ride that lets you stop off at the replica of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in Southwark and then continue to the Millennium Dome in Greenwich. And Lonely Planet does offer some restaurant recommendations I can personally endorse: the Stockpot and the Chinese Poons at the cheapest end, the Ivy and the Gay Hussar if you wish to splash out just a bit.

But Lonely Planet cannot quite match Michelin's London guide for class combined with readability. Not even the scholarly Blue Guide leads you so thoroughly yet lucidly through the National Gallery, the British Museum, Kew Gardens and hundreds of other sites. Add excellent maps, nice photos and entertaining sidebars telling you about everyone from Dick Whittington (London's great medieval mayor) to Nancy Astor (the American-born countess who became Britain's first female M.P.), and you have my own favorite guide to the city. True, Michelin is too generous with its star system, awarding a full quota of three asterisks to the Wallace Art Collection and Regent's Park as well as to the internationally important National Gallery and Westminster Abbey, and even giving one to gruesome Leicester Square. But this reflects only its compilers' infectious enthusiasm. And though it's almost overinformative in some respects, it's also incomplete. If you want recommendations for hotels or restaurants, you'll have to take a supplementary guide. That might be Michelin's own red companion volume to this green-covered tome. It could be Fodor's London or Frommer's London, both of which feature respectable restaurant and hotel reviews. Or, of course, it could be Lonely Planet.

PARIS by Adam Gopnik

A good guidebook, like a good guide, should speak the local language as well as your own and understand the essential misery and paradox of the traveler: Though we wish to tour, we do not wish to be taken for tourists. In truth, if your end is to go only where locals go, you will go no place especially colorful. Locals like such places because they can color them in for themselves, without help from their surroundings. What we really want from guidebooks are not true local haunts but places where one can see sights without necessarily and definitely being recognized as a sightseer--humane traps for intelligent tourists.

Among the new crop of guides, Frommer's Paris seems to keep to the series' old, reliable standard--it covers pretty much everything, tells you what you need to know and does it all in a pretty good spirit. The endlessly illustrated Dorling-Kindersley Travel Guide to Paris is, like all of that series, handsome and well designed. The floor plans and cutaways are always worth the price of admission. But there is something a touch disconcerting in D-K's need to forever show you things you have come to town to see for yourself. (What's the good of looking at a photograph of a cheese?)

The Complete Idiot's Travel Guide to Paris, meanwhile, deserves to be read despite the fact that it sometimes seems to be written not merely for ordinary touristic idiots like you and me but for those Americans who shouldn't be let out into the world without a keeper and a leash. "The waiter will return to take your dessert and coffee order after you've finished the main course," it informs us. Yet the idiocy is beautifully interrupted by sense: Its summary of correct restaurant manners--speak two registers more softly than you would at home (Parisians are not Germans; they like cozy, not boisterous), don't ever call out "garcon"--is absolutely right and even subtle.

In the same spirit, but oscillating even more gratingly between the fatuous and the informative, is Rick Steves' Paris 2000. Steves, who tells us that he "hangs his rucksack" in Seattle, conforms to the worst French stereotype of an American abroad: opinionated, self-confident and a little crude. And yet, gosh darn it, he actually and authentically knows his Paris. His recommendation of the Rue Cler in the Seventh, for instance, as the most typically Parisian of shopping streets, and the best, is right--even inspired--and he knows its shops just about perfectly.

But better than any of these is Richard Saul Wurman's Access: Paris. Its method of organization--with hotels, sights and restaurants grouped by neighborhood but with each category signaled by its own color--is ideal. I have learned from reading it and have yet to find it plain wrong on anything. If its judgments are at times a little staid--it rates the classic, slightly stale Taillevent as the most perfect of Parisian restaurants--it is still, to use the best of guidebook words, reliable. Not only that, it is actually full of surprising information. Though I had walked by the Fountain of the Four Seasons on the Rue de Grenelle literally thousands of times, I will confess that until I read the Access guide I had never before known why it was there. It seems that as late as the 18th century, our neighborhood was without water. Even we idiot Americans in Paris are curable, with help.

A collection of Gopnik's essays on life in France, Paris to the Moon, will be published this fall by Random House.

ROME by Alessandra Stanley

In a city of incomparable beauty and indolent pleasures, it seems almost sadistic to recommend the bracingly no-nonsense Blue Guide Rome. But there is something addictive about its thorough, authoritative descriptions of churches and art treasures, including 58 pages on the Vatican alone, complete with a concise description of how cardinals elect a new pope. The Blue Guide's underlying crisp British tone makes you want to see everything--and also straighten your spine. The section on children, for example, steers parents to the Museum of Roman Civilization, a Mussolini-built office park, for its "didactic" chronological display of cast figures detailing Ancient Roman history. Other guides, by contrast, recommend ice cream, toyshops and pony rides--activities aimed more at indulging cranky children than edifying them.

There is no more dedicated generalist's tour of art and architecture than the Blue Guide. Most guidebooks warn readers that Piazza Navona's Palazzo Pamphili, designed in the 17th century by Rainaldi and Borromini, now serves as the Brazilian Embassy and is closed to the public. The Blue Guide supplies the mailing address and fax number (Piazza Navona 14, Rome 00100; 06-686-7858) so zealous tourists can write ahead and request a special tour. The Blue Guide also includes plenty of reliable, if unimaginative, restaurant recommendations.

But an eat-your-peas approach to tourism isn't for everyone--at least not all the time. The solution is to bring two guidebooks. For a looser, less high-minded tour of the city, I prefer Fodor's Exploring Rome to the popular Eyewitness Travel Guide to Rome. The latter is beautifully laid out but ultimately more confusing and less satisfying than Fodor's.

Well written and cheerfully confident, Fodor's works harder at cramming in intriguing facts alongside its descriptions of artworks and sites. It was the only guide, for example, to mention that the Scala Santa, the staircase that Catholic pilgrims climb on their knees (because its wood is said to be from the Jerusalem house of Pontius Pilate), was allegedly where Martin Luther finally balked and began the Reformation. (Even the Blue Guide omits that detail, perhaps because the possibly apocryphal story doesn't meet its level of historical exactitude.) Fodor's also provides the most vivid description of the martyrdom of Saint Agnes--when forced to parade naked in 304 A.D., she miraculously sprouted cascades of hair to preserve her modesty--something every tourist will want to know before visiting Sant' Agnese in Agone, the church named in her honor and whose famous facade was designed by Borromini.

The book's one possible shortcoming is restaurant recommendations. Not that they're useless; it's just that, like almost every Rome guidebook, Fodor's tends to recommend the same few tourists' favorites. You can't really go wrong with these tried-and-true picks, but only another Fodor's offering--the Gold Guide to Rome--surprised me by mentioning a small, charming wine bar with excellent food, L'Osteria dell Ingegno, near the Pantheon on Piazza di Pietra, that isn't listed in any other guidebook.