36 Hours in Summertime Rome (With Kids)—Yes, It’s Possible!

By Chloe Schama

When I was in grad school in England, one of my cooler friends—a guy who had already been at the university for a year and wasn’t intimidated by the overheated (and yet somehow still damp) apartments in which our quite intense tutorials took place—absconded from school to spend some time in Italy. There, he learned a lot about wine, garlic, and how to be happy. Was he still enrolled, we wondered—jealous, too chicken to do anything so bold as drop it all—as we labored away in the dusty stacks. We weren’t clear on the answer, only that he was very relaxed when he returned, carrying the sunshine on his linen shirts.

I set off the following summer to attempt to capture some of his Mastroianni mojo, though what emerged when I landed in the eternal city were the memories of an earlier trip, when I had been brought to the Italian capital by my parents as a child. We stayed in a hotel overlooking the Piazza della Minerva, where a statue of an elephant shouldering an obelisk was a whimsical wink among all of Bernini’s muscular river gods in Piazza Navona nearby. The Pantheon was also around the corner, and I remember shuffling around its cool marble interior as my father explained the architecture and shaft of light descended from the oculus above.

In subsequent years, after grad school and after kids, my husband and I went back to Italy often. But escaping the Fiumicino airport car rental with our wits and children intact seemed like enough of a challenge after a red eye. We couldn’t quite comprehend what it might mean to brave the streets of Rome with our brood of four in tow. We would flee to the mountain town of Todi, where we rented a beautiful house from an American expat who would call us from her apartment in the nearby small city of Orvieto to check how we were getting on in her house, with its immaculately pressed linens stacked a foot high in the closets, its dozens of extra wine glasses, its library of Evelyn Waugh, its miniature painted rocking chairs. We were getting on just fine.

No matter how glorious our Umbrian idyll, I always felt a little pang when we would speed up the A1, bypassing Rome altogether. What would my children’s elephant statue be? So this year, we set the GPS for the city center rather than FCO at the tail end of our holiday and steeled ourselves for the unruly capital streets. Google Maps, still speaking in an American accent, guided us in what seemed something like a whirlpool pattern as we circled in on the Anantara Palazzo Naiadi Rome Hotel, where we would be staying for the two nights we would spend in Rome.

I should preface this by saying that my kids are essentially as thrilled by the waffle iron in a highway Hilton breakfast bar as they are by the amenities of a 238-room, five-star hotel, but even they seemed a little awed by the marble colonnade out front. When we entered the Art Deco arches of the lobby, the middle one shuffled closer to me. “Is this, first class?” he whispered under the looming Murano chandelier. At one end, an illuminated case full of pastel pastry confections beckoned, while glasses on the bar at the back of the center of the lobby salon glowed in the jewel tones of Campari and Aperol.

Upstairs, we situated ourselves in one of the hotel’s suites where the cool marble underfoot gave way to cherry red tile in the bathroom, covering all surfaces. The lighting in the shower could be adjusted to mimic something more like the dance floor of Saturday Night Fever, but the overall effect—with the suite’s chrome and leather furniture—was more Paolo Sorrentino than Bay Ridge Italiano. A child’s play tent had even been set up for my children; one of my sons promptly declared he would be spending the night sleeping in it.

By Hannah Coates

By Christian Allaire

By Kui Mwai

The suite overlooked the Piazza della Repubblica, where the Fiat cinquecentos zoomed like toy cars on a racetrack and an imposing 16th-century church stood at the north side of the circle. The hotel, in fact, is built on the remains of public baths dating back to the 4th century when the Roman emperor Diocletian would send his subjects to these venues to cleanse their bodies and their souls. Underground remains of the public spa are visible, I would learn, through plexiglass flooring on the lowest level of the hotel, and the on-site spa at Anantara (which opened just this past February) has incorporated some of the ancient rituals into their offerings. A “Diocletian bath ritual” uses ingredients that have remained unchanged for millennia: sage, lavender, honey, laurel, and olive oil.

By Hannah Coates

By Christian Allaire

By Kui Mwai

We had a mere 36 hours before our flight departed, so we set off almost immediately upon arrival in the city for the Colosseum, where a guide met us with walkie-talkie-style radios that we wore around our necks for the duration of the tour. “The children will tire of them in five minutes,” the guide told us—not so. Give my kids a semi-high-tech toy through which to transmute the ancients and they are happy campers. A many-mile trek to a fabled pizzeria (recommended by that same friend who had escaped his graduate studies) followed. It was, of course, closed for August. A passerby in bright green trousers ushered us into the pizzeria next door and we were, also predictably, delighted by it.

The next day—our only full day—we were determined to make the most of it, so we set off immediately after breakfast for the Spanish Steps and the Trevi Fountain, holding out the promise of a double gelato day to motivate the little feet to keep on pounding the cobblestone streets. Rome is not a city built for strollers, but we pushed and huffed, happy nonetheless, enchanted by the vines dripping over walls and from precarious electrical wires and the dozens of haphazardly parked cars that stood not much taller than my five-year-old. I didn’t dare attempt a museum with our limited stores of childhood patience, but no matter—the streets were their own exhibition.

The hotel staff, in their infinite wisdom, had arranged a golf cart tour—what they called an “Eat, Pray, Love” tour—an activity that did not involve hoofing it over uneven streets for the conclusion of the day, and they even set up a car seat for our one-year-old. The kids squabbled over who got to sit in the last row, their competitive anxiety a sign of the activity’s success even before it really began. The cart, deftly directed but a mustachioed driver named Antonio, whisked us past the major sites—the Vatican, Gianicolo Hill—but also drove us down streets we never would have found on our own: the charming Via Del Pellegrino, for instance, lined with with bookstores, boutiques, bars, and erboristeries. (I’m told that other iterations of the tour involve trips to the city’s best biscotti makers and hidden artisanal chocolate purveyors.) The biggest gift of all, perhaps: Antonio sensed declining blood sugar levels and deposited us at a snack shop in Trastevere where we feasted on supplì and arancini, and the kids thoroughly ruined their dinner.

By Hannah Coates

By Christian Allaire

By Kui Mwai

But no worries—the kids weren’t our problem for the night. Our angelic Italian babysitter had arrived to watch over them while my husband and I made our way upstairs to the Anantara’s rooftop bar, SEEN by Olivier, which has been extensively remodeled in recent months, its menu revamped to feature a selection of raw fish the likes of which we hadn’t seen for weeks after our carb-loading weeks in the country. We hadn’t planned to stay for more than drinks, but the menu proved too tempting. As we ate, we flicked through the photos we had accumulated over the past day and a half—certain that we had crammed our children so full of memorable experiences that they would be going home with something resembling their very own elephant statues.

Amenities: Seasonal outdoor pool, full-service spa, gym, two restaurants, rooftop terrace, soundproofed rooms

Address: P.za della Repubblica, 48, 00185 Roma RM, Italy