an icecream
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but only for a while...

Here's a couple of tots in Rome enjoying their gelati by the Trevi Fountain,
but apart from the Disney Shop round the corner on Via del Corso, there's not much else for children to do in Rome. In fact they probably won't even enjoy that much, as the merchandise in the Rome branch of the Disney shop is more geared towards clothing and less towards toys and souvenirs than the British and Stateside outlets.

Unless you're actually moving here to live, we frankly don't recommend you bring small children with you to Rome. They won't get much out of it and will probably be bored out of their skulls, spoiling both their holiday and yours. Children do not give a toss about Michaelangelo or Fellini. Remember that.

Rome is a playground for grownups,
not for children.

Recreational amenities for kids are abysmal here because Italian children are brought up to enjoy eating and frolicking in the bosom of their family as their main source of entertainment, neither of which things British children are particulary good at.
Thus, unless you have something specific planned, the typical British or American child may well soon become decidedly listless and ugly-tempered here, partly because of the lack of recreational provision in the city, and partly because of the heat, which can be unbearable for a child from a cooler country.

Public playgrounds generally harbour dangerous, poorly serviced equipment and public parks are often wild, barren places littered with used syringes left by drug addicts.

dinosaur museums

There aren't any.

Not in Rome anyway.
There is the 'Museo Preistorico ed Etnografico' which purports to have prehistoric Italian artefacts, but we phoned then up one rainy Saturday morning when we were stuck for somewhere to take the children, and asked if they had any dinosaur skeletons there and they told us they didn't have any and neither did anyone else in Rome. Unless your children are budding Indiana Jones's or Lara Croft's, a prehistoric museum without dinosaur skeletons is a bit like an ice-cream cone without ice-cream in it. Italians are masters of 'the let-down'.

The countryside immediately surrounding Rome is dull, parched and scrubby and mostly fenced off into private estates patrolled by semi-wild sheep-dogs, which in short means there are no green fields to run, roam and picnic in. You'll have to drive a couple of hundred miles north to Tuscany for that; Yet even Tuscany, in spite of it's fashionable Arcadian attractions for adults, can seem a strangely alien and barren place to children. Italian countryside only looks good from a distance;
A bit like the end of a rainbow - In Italy when you actually get to the lovely spot you've espied from half a mile away, you'll discover it to be actually just a scorched and thorny patch of bare, dry, stony soil, prickly thorns and sickly weeds, with thin, mean strands of anaemic looking grass and tortured undergrowth lacking any real verdure. The Italian countryside is, well, 'hostile'... The reason is simple - The intensity of the Mediterranean sun gives the Italian landscape a positively golden glow when seen in panorama. However, that same sun is scorching out all the moisture and green from the plants, thus the cool watery shades at the blue and green end of the spectrum that we see even close-up in the lush greenery of an English meadow are totally lacking in the Italian countryside. The much lauded beauty of Tuscany is in reality only a photogenic quality, and that with judicious cropping and a big zoom lens for condensed perspective of its sparse rolling hills and regimental rows of vineyards, olivegroves and cypress trees, all generating a landscape that looks good in the Sunday paper colour travel supplement or on TV, but is in fact of substantially larger and less cosy scale than the winding green lanes and bluebell woods of Kent or Surrey.
In the movie 'Gladiator', director Ridley Scott wheels out his old beer commercial techniques by the barrel-full to make Maximus's Tuscan villa look like heaven, but believe me, we live here, and close up it ain't like that. It's arid, thorn and mosquito-infested land and your children will be disappointed, and so, if you're honest, might you be, after seeing the Italian countryside up close and personal. They don't have fairies here either.

The ice-cream's good though...