Louis Vuitton City Guides

By EWAM McDONALD

Rough Guides they ain't. The Louis Vuitton City Guides, elegantly dressed in Florentine violet this year, provide indispensable listings for well-heeled visitors to 32 European cities.

The guide, presented as a boxed set of eight slim, paperbound books, aims to present the best, the latest, the traditional and the quirky in cities from London to Lisbon, Porto to St Petersburg.

Little inns and grand hotels, pastry shops and celeb-chef restaurants, designer boutiques and flea-markets are detailed. As you'd expect from the publisher, most are temples to conspicuous consumption rather than the local discount store or Joe's Burger Bar.

Befitting its position among the continent's cities (the French would say, "the world's cities"), Paris claims a volume to itself. And five new towns have been added for 2001: Bordeaux, Florence, Porto, St Petersburg and Zurich.

$125