This article examines Salvatore Rubbino’s three travel-guide picture-book texts and the ideological management of childhood, mobility, adult-child power dynamics, and the city that they reveal. Rubbino’s books assume adults’ pedagogic and social authority, characters’ economic power (and tacitly that of readers), and an untroubled engagement with globalization, tourism, and consumption discourses. While guidebooks for children possess great potential for the promotion of child-centred discovery, literary tourism experiences for child readers, and the opportunity for young people to inhabit and explore “other” places and perspectives through literature, Rubbino’s picture books are preoccupied ultimately with an ideological regulation of children’s imaginative and physical mobility.