But if there's one occasion when that rule should be broken it's writing about the city of Dresden.
That's because this former East German settlement is the phoenix that has risen from the ashes.
Towards the end of the Second World War, when the good guys were chasing Hitler's goons back across Europe, the Allies decided it was time to make a statement by firebombing Dresden.
The event is still controversial because, at the time, the city was said to have no military significance.
Dresden was home to around 5,000 people but more than 600,000 refugees from other parts of eastern Europe, mostly women and children who had lost their homes and had to survive with their men away at war, migrated to the destination because it was seen as a safe place to hide from the hostilities.
There were no military camps in Dresden, and the only link to the war was a transport depot on the outskirts of town.
During three days in February 1945 more than 650,000 incendiary bombs were dropped on the city, devises that were designed to crash through buildings and then explode once they were inside.
The entire city caught fire during the raids, and while the final death toll is still debated it's thought that around 250,000 people perished.
Most survived the actual bombing but died in the inferno, with many suffocating after the tunnels they were sheltering in filled with toxic gases from the blaze.
When the fires were finally extinguished the city was rubble, but it didn't stay that way for long.
Reconstruction started in 1946 - the first buildings to be rebuilt were the pavilions surrounding King Augustus the Strong's Festive Garden - and work continues today.
The town's Semperoper was another public structure that had to be rebuilt after World War Two, but this wasn't such a tough ask because it had already been built twice before.
Dresden's first opera house was constructed in 1841, but that burnt down 27 years later when one of the gas lamps used to illuminate the stage started a fire.
It was reconstructed in 1878, destroyed again in 1945, and then put up for the third time in 1977 when Dresden was part of East Germany.
The reconstruction process was controversial, especially during the early days of Communist occupation, when many of the locals didn't have a roof over their head.
Many people objected that ornate structures were going up to accommodate opera and art, while they didn't have a place to live, but the Communists said culture was the soul of the city and the buildings were needed to restore identity.
I'm glad they did, because the Dresden of today is an enchanting place.
We did a day trip from Prague, something that's very doable now the borders are open and a long stop to check passports isn't part of the journey, and we had four hours in the settlement after the two-hour drive north.
We did a walking tour with a local guide who told us stories from the two most significant events of the city's history - the 1945 fire bombing and the years of the Communist regime - and then had a couple of hours to explore on our own.
The most famous building to be revived is the city's baroque cathedral, the Frauenkirche, and it's easy to see just how much of the grand structure had to be recreated.
After the bombing only one corner of the cathedral was left standing, so everything from that point was build to imitate the original.
The locals tried to save as much of the original materials as they could, and today the black bricks mark the originals with the lighter stones showing the new material.
I walked past the cathedral a couple of times, and was interested to hear from our guide Petra that the building didn't receive a direct hit during the bombing but was destroyed by the blaze.
All the surrounding structures caught fire, generating an enormous amount of heat which caused the church's timbers to ignite, and the Frauenkirche collapsed two days after the last plane flew over Dresden.
I knew about the cathedral, and was keen to see that for myself, but the unexpected treasure was the long porcelain mural that occupies one wall of Augustus' castle.
Back in 1847 a local art teacher painted the mural on the wall - called the Procession of the Dukes it captured some of the city's most famous medieval residents in full military regalia - but the picture soon washed off in the weather.
In 1905 the whole scene was put onto 24,000 Meissen porcelain tiles, which were fired twice to make them perfectly weatherproof, and the mural was recreated.
While the whole area was completely destroyed in 1945, only 200 tiles were damaged by shrapnel and they were quickly replaced.
While most of the city has been rebuilt to look like the original, some parts were changed and a river-side promenade is one of the post-war improvements.Before the bombing bleak apartment buildings occupied the riverbank, but after the firestorm the area was left vacant and an elevated footpath constructed to let people get to the museums and galleries in the part of town.
After wandering around town I found myself on the footpath, and walked back to the bus while eating a scoop of strawberry gelato and enjoying the spring sunshine.
And it was something I appreciated doing, because I imagine there were great blocks of time in the city's recent history when eating a scoop of gelato while taking a leisurely walk beside the river was the last things the local could or wanted to do.
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