The conversation had grown annoyingly familiar:
Us: “We’re going to Italy!”
Them: “Oh, that is sooooo great! Italy is sooooo fabulous! The food. The art. The scenery. I went there on my honeymoon/ last summer/when I was just out of college and absolutely loved it. You will too… . ”
Then in the midst of their rhapsodic travelogue came the inevitable, quizzical pause.
Them: “But, wait, what are you doing with the kids?”
Us: “We’re taking them with us.”
Further discussion would then proceed in one of two ways. The brave souls would tell us to our faces we had lost our minds, that taking three kids to any foreign country was insane, but taking a 10-year-old, a 7-year-old and a 5-year-old to Italy for two weeks was a waste of a fabulous trip.
Everyone else said it behind our backs.
We went anyway.
There is a popular notion in this country that once you have children, all of the really cool, exotic travel adventure is over – at least until the kids are off to college or unless you have a trusty, live-in babysitter handy.
Unfortunately many parents (and we were once among them) have settled for the definition of “family travel” as either Disney, a road trip to some national park or – if you have loads of cash – a walled-in, all-inclusive beach resort somewhere with scheduled activities for the kidlets while Mom and Dad play golf, get a massage or have a nice dinner out.
Nonsense. While there is nothing wrong with any of those options, there is a much bigger, surprisingly affordable world out there just waiting to be explored and sampled by families with children.
It’s all in how you do it.
Which, by the way, starts with not listening to those who say you’re crazy.
I had longed to go to Italy since 1986, when I first saw “A Room With a View.”
Little did I know 20 years would pass before I could do my own flinging open of shutters to take in the splendor of the Tuscan countryside. And certainly I had no idea my room would come with three children clustered on a couch huddled over a squawking Gameboy (packed with battery recharger and an extra handful of triple-As).
We may have been crazy, but we weren’t stupid.
And that brings me to another important rule in traveling to faraway lands with kids: Sometimes you have to adjust your fantasy.
We arrived in Rome on Sept. 2 and rented a car for the drive north into Tuscany. Once you get used to the notion that, a) cars are much smaller than in the United States and, b) Italians drive them much faster, it is perfectly sensible and usually smarter when traveling with kids to be in charge of your own transportation.
We traveled in September because airfares were slightly cheaper. We used a discount ticket consolidator (found on the Internet) and saved thousands of dollars. Unfortunately, though, prices still can be high for rooms. Italy has grown so popular that high season now extends into late fall, but at least by September the crowds had lessened.
Ah, but what about school?
I am a firm believer in the School of Life. Classes began for our children in the middle of August. I figured even with my youngest starting kindergarten there would be plenty of time to settle in and participate in all the back-to-school events before we left. I cleared it with their teachers, who assigned them each a travel diary to be shared with classmates when they returned. My kindergartener, who could not yet read or write, was told to draw pictures of what she saw.
This struck me as every bit as academic and probably more profoundly educational than what they would miss in the classroom. My hope is someday when they are studying the Renaissance or the politics of the Vatican it will trigger a memory. Oh yeah, I saw that.
Travel with curiosity
It is important that as the world continues to shrink, that children, especially American children, learn to travel in unfamiliar surroundings with ease and with curiosity.
We rented a cozy two bedroom, two-bath apartment in a converted stone farmhouse in the little-known Tuscan village of Bettolle. It cost roughly $900 a week. We picked it off the Internet from a list of properties offered for rent by the owners. It was billed as a working farm, but that was a stretch. There were a few grape vines, some fruit trees and one rouge rooster who was rather insistent at dawn. Not exactly agriturismo.
Still, there were beautiful gardens, a pool for the kids and a welcoming owner who surprised us one night with a plate of homemade pasta and cheese when she learned we had failed to make it to the local grocery store before it closed.
The price was less than the going rate for many countryside villas in better known areas such as Chianti or Cortona. But the Italian father of my daughter’s classmate laughed when he heard we were going to Tuscany. “Oh yes,” he said, “The American quarter.”
Still, because Bettolle is mostly overlooked, it felt authentic. Few people spoke English. The men each day would gather in the tiny village square to sip their wine and gossip. The women remained cloistered and shy inside the ancient stone houses. Since few tourists visit, we quickly became conspicuous regulars at the local eateries.
No, we did not speak Italian. Often we had no clue what we were doing or where we were going. But a good dose of deference, a smile and some rudimentary sign language served us well.
But there was also the Italian affection for children that gave us an instant access and acceptance I never could have imagined. While many people think you lose something by traveling with kids, I believe we gained much more than we lost.
One day, after stumbling onto a spectacular local jousting tournament festival in Arezzo, an Italian family with children about the same age as ours noticed our oldest son could not see the action. Our younger two were perched on my and my husband’s shoulders but our 10-year-old was being swallowed by the crowd.
The mother ushered my son to a prime spot in the front row next to her own children. Not a word was spoken, just a smile and a nod from mom to mom.
Maybe there is a universal language after all.
Bribery a big assist
I knew the Christian themes in Italian art were going to be a challenge for our kids. OK, truth be told, all art museums are a challenge to children’s patience. But we were not going to travel to Italy and skip some of the most glorious paintings, sculpture and architecture in the world.
This is where bribery became key: One gelato for every museum. Pizza slices and quid pro quo visits to parks, playgrounds and the occasional toy shop worked well too.
Theologians might have quibbled with it, but before we began our excursion into the world of Renaissance art, I gave the kids the 90-second rundown on Christianity. It must have worked, because after we climbed the 900-plus steps to the top of the Duomo in Florence, my younger son glanced up at the ceiling fresco and correctly announced, “Oh, I know what’s happening there. That’s the battle between Heaven and Hell.”
Which brings up another one of those rules for traveling with kids: Don’t force-feed more culture than they want or can handle. They’ll get a lot more than you think.
It was the kids who came up with their own way of coping during a probably over-long visit to the Uffizi. My husband and I tag-teamed our art viewing while the kids parked on benches in each room and played round after round of I Spy with the paintings.
An American tourist watched this unfold for a good long while and then approached me to say how she had never seen anything like it. She couldn’t wait to call her daughter back home so she could try it out on her own kids.
I figure art appreciation comes in many forms.
From Tuscany we traveled to Positano on the Amalfi coast for a couple of days to let the kids (and us) unwind on the beach. Again we stayed in a small, family-run hotel and were given an entire floor complete with a large balcony that overlooked the turquoise Mediterranean. The mother and daughter who ran the place fussed over us like we were their long-lost relatives.
There are no rules
I took great satisfaction in knowing our balcony view was the same shared by guests at the world-famous La Sirenuse two doors down. We paid about $250 a night (our biggest splurge); they paid as much as $1,000.
Which brings us the last of my rules: There are no rules.
We chose Italy because I was channeling Helena Bonham Carter. Maybe you will choose France or India or China. We liked staying in small hotels and apartments because they felt more authentic and were cheaper. Maybe you will choose something else.
A friend called me the other day to say she wanted to go to Spain with her kids, but everyone was telling her it was a mistake. She begged me to tell her it was possible.
It’s possible.
Staff writer Jenny Deam can be reached at 303-820-1261 or jdeam@denverpost.com.
