Today is VE Day, and it happened to fall on the birthday of the literary critic and man of letters Edmund Wilson.
Wilson toured Europe during the spring of 1945, and turned his travels through Italy, Greece and England into a book released in 1947.
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/edmund-wilson/europe-without-baedeker/
"Europe Without Baedeker: Sketches Among The Ruins"
along with Wilson's other reporting during the war contains a lot of cultural observations about Britons, Italians, Greeks, and Americans that still strikes a chord today.