The Little Tour: A Journey to Europe's Four Minature States

This is indeed a strange book. It is written in six parts, by two authors. The authors names are Giles Playfair and Constantine Fitzgibbon, and I must admit, at first I thought they may just be a plot device - you know, non de plumes to add interest to a book by a single author. However, from what I can find they are both appear to be legitimate!
The introduction sets the background for the book, and the relationship between the authors. They mock each other, and they introduce their intent (originally by one of the authors only, but the second invites himself to join) to write a book about the small countries of Europe. They call it The little Tour in self mockery of their less than grand effort at The Grand Tour. In the introduction they set up the fact that they never refer to each other by name, only calling each other The Collaborator, and joining them is a lady photographer, who, as you may have guessed, if referred to throughout the book only as The lady Photographer. In similar absurdity, there are no photographs in the book. At one point a person they visit asks the name of the lady photographer, she replies, by the collaborator doesn't hear. In the introduction, the authors agree that they will split the countries up, and write two each. The travel takes place in 1953.

The first country they tackle is Andorra. There is some travel to reach Andorra, some history, some politics and then some very amusing, if very negative, retelling of the travel experience. At the end of the second part of the book, we were tracking for 4 stars.

Then came Monaco. The travel they undertook in Monaco occupied around 5 pages at the end of the section, and took place completely within a casino, in one evening. The prior part of this section of the book was an explanation of some horrible people met on the French Riviera on the way to Monaco, and an incredibly boring history and politics lesson on Monaco. Here I was thinking this is a 1 or 2 star chapter, overall, we are down to 3 stars, but I had hope for improvement.

So on to Liechtenstein, and the second collaborator. This author had previously been to Liechtenstein twice, and the retelling of those two visit took up the lions share of this chapter. With those visits, some history and politics, there is a little time at the end of the chapter for the visit of the collaborators and the lady photographer. This part of the book was a three star read, so overall, I was still at 3 stars.

And finally, San Marino. Collaborator one (ie not the author of this section) and the lady photographer both have very low expectations for San Marino. “Pro-communist and egalitarian”, are the expectations, and “the worst one of the lot”. But after some history and politics, they both found themselves enchanted with the place, and there was plenty of opportunity to mock the ‘quite new Kursaal' which is a building constructed a few years earlier to contain a casino. The casino however threatened the popularity of the nearby Italian Casinos, and Italy put their foot down. Having no legal right to protest, they exerted pressure at the borders, and by reducing subsidies, and of course the casino closed after a year. The building however, empty as was, remained near the top of must see list from the tourist office, who referred to it as the ‘quite new Kursaal'. This chapter was back on track and fairly amusing.

The final pages are a brief summary, which is neither here nor there, so for me this ends in an up and down three stars.