If you think Rick's works fall into the "Travel for Dummies" category, I'd love for you to read the collected works of the USS SHANGRI-LA (CVA-38)'s Special Services Officer's Informational Brochures (distributed to each crew member prior to entering port) for each of the ship's Liberty Ports during her 1963-64 deployment to the US 6th Fleet in the Mediterranean. I don't recall much about the author. Duty, even collateral duty, as the Special Services Officer, was not career-enhancing, but his 3 pages describing Rapallo, Sta. Margarita and Portofino are gems, veritable classics in the Stevesian vein, almost as pithy as his words of wisdon for our the port call in Cannes during the local "Film Festival" where the novelty of occasional topless starlets attracting photographers and mobs of young sailors, back then rarely exposed to the sight of bare breasts, was a principal diversion from sight-seeing, etc..