Rome with Kids: Gladiators, Gelato and a Boating Lake

Rome is a easier city with children than its heat and its crowds suggest, for one reason: the history here is the kind children already know. A gladiatorial arena, an emperor's palace, a river with an island in it. You do not have to explain why the Colosseum matters to a seven-year-old.

What Rome demands is restraint. The centre is dense with major sites and it is entirely possible to plan four in a day, then spend that day queuing in the sun with an increasingly unhappy child. One big ancient thing, one park, and a great deal of ice cream is the working formula.

Key facts

• Best for: ages 5 and up
• Time needed: one full day
• Getting around: on foot mostly; the historic centre is compact but the cobbles are hard on pushchairs
• Best months: July and August are punishingly hot; spring and autumn are far better

8:30 — The Colosseum, at opening

Book a timed entry online before you travel. This is not optional advice in season — the queue for same-day tickets can consume a morning, and the ticket usually covers the Roman Forum and Palatine Hill as well.

Inside, aim low rather than comprehensive. Children want to stand where the arena floor was and understand what happened there; they do not want a forty-minute account of Flavian construction methods. The partially reconstructed arena floor and the view down into the underground passages, where animals and fighters were raised by lift, is the moment that lands.

Allow an hour to ninety minutes, then leave while everyone is still enjoying it.

10:30 — The Forum and Palatine, briefly

The Forum is a field of ruins and it can read as rubble to a child. The Palatine Hill above it works better: it is green, shaded, high, and you can see the Circus Maximus from the edge — an enormous flat oval where chariot races were held, now a public park. That is easy to picture and children do picture it.

If the mood has already turned, skip both. The ticket is spent and it is not worth ruining the day to use every part of it.

12:30 — Lunch away from the ruins

The streets immediately around the Colosseum are the worst value in Rome. Walk ten minutes into Monti, the neighbourhood just north — small squares, ordinary restaurants, and pizza al taglio shops where pizza is sold by weight and cut with scissors, which is exactly the lunch a tired child wants.

14:30 — Villa Borghese

The great Roman park, and the answer to the afternoon. It sits above the Spanish Steps, reached by a lift from Piazzale Flaminio or a walk up through the gardens.

Inside there is a boating lake with rowing boats to hire, bicycles and four-person pedal carts for rent along the main avenues, a small zoo — the Bioparco — and a great deal of shade. There is also a children's cinema and a puppet theatre on the Pincio terrace on some days.

The Galleria Borghese, with the Bernini sculptures, is inside the same park and requires booking a fixed two-hour slot in advance. It is superb and it is not a children's museum; if you want it, split the party.

17:00 — Explora, if the children are small

North-west of the park, near Piazza del Popolo, Explora is Rome's children's museum: a hands-on space aimed at roughly ages 3 to 11, with a supermarket to play in, water and construction areas, and a garden. Entry is by timed session and must usually be booked; sessions are limited in number, so it needs planning rather than improvisation.

19:00 — The evening walk

Rome's centre in the evening is the best it is all day: the stone goes gold, the temperature drops, and the piazzas fill with families doing exactly what you are doing.

Walk from Piazza Navona to the Pantheon to the Trevi Fountain. It is about twenty minutes of actual walking and an hour of stopping. The Pantheon's open oculus overhead is the single most impressive thing a child will see in Rome after the Colosseum, and it is free to look up at from the square even if the queue inside is long.

Gelato: look for muted colours and metal lids rather than fluorescent mounds, and expect to buy it twice.

Two more, if you have the days

Ostia Antica is a Roman port town, ruined and largely intact, about forty minutes by train from the centre. It is flatter, greener, far emptier than the Forum and children can climb on things — for many families it works better than anything in the city.

The cats at Largo di Torre Argentina live in a sunken square of ruins where Caesar is believed to have been killed, and there is a cat sanctuary on site. It takes ten minutes and it is free.

Practical notes

Public drinking fountains — the small cast-iron spouts called nasoni — run cold, safe water all over the city. Carry a bottle and refill; buying water in the centre is a needless expense.

Cobbles are hard work with a pushchair. A carrier is easier for a small child if you have one.

And book everything with a timed entry that offers one. In Rome the queue, not the walking, is what ends a family day early.