• Jump to Skye’s top recommendations for traveling in Italy with kids.

“WE ARE ALL pilgrims who seek Italy,” Goethe wrote upon his return to chilly Germany following two years spent basking in the warmth of the Mediterranean sun. It’s a line I scribbled in the margins of a journal when I was in my 20s and living in Paris. If there is a city in the world more beautiful than Paris, I don’t know what it is. It is especially stunning at night in the rain — which is good, because you get to see it that way a lot. The summers are glorious, but the rest of the seasons? It rains all the time, and in winter it’s dark by 4 p.m. During the years I lived there, I often longed to escape the cold, the drizzle, the low, gray sky so relentless it has a name (la grisaille). Which is how I discovered Italy.

The first time I stepped foot in Italy, I took a train down to San Remo with my boyfriend and a friend, where we spent Easter weekend in a gloriously faded resort hotel with a saltwater pool designed by Gio Ponti. Our friend, who would later become godfather to my youngest daughter, played a piano concert to an audience of two (us), and as the music echoed through the empty public sitting room, I felt like I was in a Fitzgerald story. The trip was short, and ended with a train strike (we were returning to France, after all). But despite a rattling 10-plus-hour drive back over the Alps in a janky rental car with a sticky manual transmission and a tinny radio that picked up more fuzz than stations, I was completely and unquestionably hooked.

One of the most delightful things I have found about having children is getting to share with them the experiences and places that have been meaningful in my life. Traveling is my greatest pleasure, and traveling with my kids has been an ongoing joy — except, of course, for that pesky global pandemic. My youngest daughter was three when Covid hit. Although she had traveled widely as a baby, we spent so little time outside of our house for the better part of two years that she didn’t remember, ever, being on an airplane. The first time we took her on one again, this past winter, she had such a big meltdown during a layover that we had to corral her into a corner of the airport and let her continue her tantrum at full volume until she had worn herself out. I watched in horror as fellow passengers took out their phones to casually film her screams, and prayed she didn’t wind up going viral on TikTok.

Somehow, though, we got up the courage to travel with her again. And I couldn’t think of anywhere I wanted to go more than Italy.

Landing in Rome in early April felt like the scene in “The Wizard of Oz” where Dorothy flings open the door to a new world of technicolor. Still cold in New York, in the Italian capital the wisteria were in full bloom, along with the red bud trees and everything else around the city, giving the feeling of being inside a verdant, botanical dream. We arrived the morning of my younger daughter’s fifth birthday. Our hotel greeted us with balloons and chocolates in the room; we celebrated with a cake at each meal we had that day. Blowing out her third set of candles, her joy was undiminished as she smiled at the cries of “Aguri!” being shouted our way from the surrounding diners. (She was a delight on the plane, by the way, connecting so deeply with a stewardess that, several months later, she still mentions her by name from time to time.)

My daughters trooped through the streets of Rome, clocking upwards of 15,000 steps a day without complaint like the tough little city kids they are. They rode the small train through the Villa Borghese, found the drains in the floor of the Pantheon, and ate pasta and mountains of gelato, of course, several times a day. At night, they slept heavily, sharing a bed that the five-year-old declared looked like it belonged to a princess. In Venice they gazed into the windows at all the delicate glassware, completed a scavenger-hunt walk of the city where they found 127 winged lions, and actually, unimaginably, listened to the guide in the boat tour we took explain the history of what we were seeing, including the etymology of the word “ghetto.” They also jumped for hours on the trampoline on the grounds of our hotel, and somehow, magically, made it through a course at a Michelin-starred restaurant. The dinner was an invitation from the hotel that I couldn’t turn down, though I breathed a huge sigh of relief when they headed back to the room after eating their pasta to watch a movie — my husband and I were able to actually enjoy our meal.

Our last stop was an agriturismo in Tuscany. It was the week after Easter, and the property was filled with European families who could have been stand-ins for ours, with some minor linguistic substitutions. There were numerous children the same age as my daughters, and the lack of a single shared language was no deterrent to finding their way to play. In the evenings the children tumbled in and out of the restaurant in small packs, as the parents had long, easy dinners. One boy a little bigger than my younger daughter followed her inside, holding her hand.