A trip to Rome and the Amalfi Coast can be catered to young visitors without sacrificing culture or luxury.
By: Jack Sullivan
Seventeen years ago, I wrote a travel article for these pages on the marvels of the Amalfi Coast. On that unforgettable trip, I met Gore Vidal, who accurately described this region as a "place out of this world, one of the few places, in fact, that hasn’t been ruined." My wife and I felt an intense need to go back, but we now have two very smart, easily bored boys, ages 10 and 11. We wanted them to experience Italy, a uniquely beautiful and child-friendly place: they seemed just old enough to get it, and would soon be too old to want to be seen with us in public in Italy or anywhere else. But Europe isn’t Disney World, and I did not want Amalfi’s rarified atmosphere spoiled by "THIS IS BORING!" whined again and again by cranky children.
The decision to begin in Rome did quell my anxieties a bit. I had a feeling my boys would enjoy the Colloseum, the Forum and other pagan monuments associated with mayhem and magic. And they did, mainly because unlike museum pieces, these aren’t objects of passive contemplation: you go into these great buildings, which to this day are mysterious and magical. Even for children, the Colloseum and Pantheon induce the "intoxication" described by Edward Gibbon when he first saw the Roman ruins. My kids also loved the brilliantly cartoon-like Bernini fountains, especially the adorable dolphins hugging each other and spouting away in front of the Pantheon. Our Roman holiday was all the more wonderful because my wife had sense enough to purchase a salvation from chaos called the Rome Pass, which instantly put us at the front of many terrifying lines, including one at the entrance of the Colloseum that looked like the entire Japanese and Austro-German empires dumped off two huge tourist buses. Buy this magic card if you want to survive Rome with kids.
One queue the Pass didn’t save us from was that horror of horrors, the Vatican Line. This monument to masochism is not one endless line but about 12, twisting nightmarishly within each other, all cunningly contrived to keep you from seeing the Sistine Chapel until the very end, when you are finally dumped into an exhausted mob panting and staring up at the ceiling. "It’s just another painting," my weary older son said after this experience, "and you can’t even see it that well." Not what you want to hear about Michelangelo’s masterpiece from your child, but what else could he say?
Also, think hard before you subject your family to the "New and Noteworthy" (as Rome for Kids calls it) Time Elevator, a simulator-ride that jerks you about as you watch cheesy computer graphics in a movie depicting a fictitious time-traveler interviewing Michelangelo and other luminaries played by laughably bad actors. This gaudy rip-off ostensibly celebrated the glory of the Roman Empire, but it seemed more like a symptom of its fall. My kids saw right through it: "Very annoying, Daddy. Tell everybody not to see it." Take their advice.
On the other hand, don’t miss the Fountains at the Villa d’Este in Tivoli, just outside Rome, one of the wonders of the world that most kid travel guides don’t even mention. Hundreds of Renaissance fountains constructed on a huge green hill spout intricate cascades of water from lions, monkeys, snakes, musical instruments, gods and monsters of all sorts, as they have been doing for five hundred years. Some of these eruptions are hilariously scatological (my kids forbade me to describe them here because they didn’t want our family "embarrassed" in print). All of them are extraordinary feats of art and engineering totally accessible to children, an example of how kids can appreciate high culture in Italy because Italians have such a childlike sense of play, even in their most complex creations.
From Rome, we traveled on a comfortable train to Naples, then switched to a private car for a dizzying ride down the Amalfi Drive, a steep mountain road that seems, in John Steinbeck’s words, "carefully designed to be a little narrower than two cars side by side." One of my kids experienced car-sickness; the other delighted in this unique roller coaster ride, which began when an infinite expanse of sea and sky suddenly burst into view after we went through a nondescript tunnel; looking down, we saw terraces, towers, gardens, and verandas toppling down into the Bay of Salerno, a pool of shifting light with Vesuvius, Capri, Ischia and the rock islands that were once the mythological Sirens beckoning in the distance.
Once we got to the hotel, the gorgeous Miremare (see box), our trip turned into a dream. Our kids loved the Amalfi Coast even more than Rome. Dickens wrote of "the thousands of distant beauties of the Bay… changing in the mist and sunshine twenty times a day." Parents can lose themselves for hours in this splendid vista make sure you get a room with a view while the children swim or fish. At Positano, built up and down the sides of a giant concave rock, you walk to a relatively uncrowded beach off to the right or clomp straight down steeply circling stairs to the boisterously crowded beach in front of the cafes; at Amalfi, you climb into the sea from ladders built into craggy stone (see box). You don’t swim in this bay so much as float, so salty and serene is the water. Bring goggles, for kids love to look for fish under the crystalline blue-green water. My kids are not fishermen and loathe seafood, but with the help of cheerful locals they caught perch in Positano which the friendly Café Positano cleaned and cooked for the proud parents and octopi in Amalfi. It was a marvelous adventure, "different from anything else," as my children put it.
After a few languid days, we tore ourselves away from this paradise to visit Pompei. It was hard to do, and I feared it might be a mistake: our boys, though they live one block from the Museum of Natural History, shun museums and artifacts of all sorts. But this was different: Pompei was a treat because it’s a real city, huge and incredibly intact, destroyed by the same volcano that forever preserved it. My kids called Pompei "amazing": it has streets, gymnasiums, theaters, bars, kitchens, bathrooms, human bodies and pornography, revealing ancient life as it was actually lived. The key for suspicious children like mine who fear you’re just dragging them to more "old buildings" is to go late in the day when the blazing sun is setting, and to splurge as we did at the last minute on a private guide who will make the children feel special and will hit the most vivid spots in this vast site without wearing everyone out.
In the end, my anxieties about taking kids to Italy were misplaced. There is a huge amount to enjoy and I haven’t even mentioned pizza. Italian food is a natural lure for kids; mine came to love the real thing as opposed to the tourist rip-offs we occasionally blundered into from exhaustion or laziness (see box). The one downside is that we’re spoiled now, and will surely have a hard time eating spaghetti and meatballs (unknown in Italy) and cardboard American pizza. All the more reason to go back soon, before the curse of adolescence strikes.