Is Italy Good for Families? My Honest Take

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I have been to Italy more times than anywhere else in Europe, and every single one of those trips was before Lochlan. I went as a person who could get on a train at six in the morning, walk eleven miles, eat dinner at nine and do it again the next day. That version of me is not planning this trip.

So when people ask me whether Italy is good for families, I want to be careful about what I am actually answering. I know Italy. I do not yet know Italy with a toddler. What I can tell you is which parts of it I think will hold up with a small child attached to us, which parts I am genuinely worried about, and what I would change about every trip I have already taken.

The short version

Yes, Italy is good for families, and it is better than most of Europe at it. Children are genuinely welcome in restaurants rather than tolerated. The food is the single easiest cuisine on earth for a picky two-year-old. Distances between the places worth seeing are short, and the trains that cover them are fast and cheap.

The hard parts are not the ones people warn you about. It is not safety and it is not the language. It is the heat in July and August, the cobblestones versus your stroller, and the fact that dinner does not start until eight. Those are solvable, but you have to plan around them rather than discover them.

What makes Italy easy with a small child

Start with the food, because it is the thing that will matter most on day three when everyone is tired. Plain pasta with butter or olive oil is on every menu in the country and nobody will blink when you order it. Pizza bianca. Bread. Fruit. A two-year-old can eat well in Italy without a single negotiation, and that is not true in most places I have travelled.

Then there is the attitude. Italy likes children in a way that is hard to describe until you have seen it. Waiters talk to them. Strangers talk to them. A toddler having a loud moment in a restaurant is not a social emergency. I have watched a server in Sorrento carry a crying baby around the dining room so the parents could finish eating. Nobody found it remarkable.

The geography helps too. Florence to Venice is about two hours on a fast train. Naples to Sorrento is an hour on the Circumvesuviana line. You are not spending whole days in transit the way you would crossing a bigger country, and a two-hour train with a toddler is a completely different thing from a two-hour drive.

One more thing that is easy to miss until you are in it: Italy runs on apartments. Between the rental apartments in every historic center and the agriturismi in Tuscany, you can almost always get a kitchen, a washing machine and a bedroom with a door that closes. That last one is the whole game. A hotel room where the baby sleeps three feet from you means your evening ends at seven, and ten days of that is not a holiday.

And the cities themselves are small. Florence is genuinely walkable, with the major sights within reach of each other on foot. Venice has no cars and no bikes at all on the main islands, which is the single most relaxing thing about being there with a child who has just learned to run.

What makes it hard

The cobblestones. I cannot overstate this. Florence, Venice and most of the historic centers you want to be in are paved in stone that was laid before strollers existed. A cheap umbrella stroller will fight you the entire time. I have watched parents carry a folded stroller and a child at the same time over a Venice bridge, and there are four hundred of those bridges.

The heat is the other one. July and August in Florence are brutal, and the old buildings hold it. My own Florence guide calls summer very hot and points to fall or spring instead, and I wrote that for adults. With a toddler in a stroller sitting two feet closer to the stone, it matters more.

August brings a second problem. Much of Italy closes in August, particularly around Ferragosto on the fifteenth, when families leave the cities for the coast. Restaurants shut for two or three weeks. The places still open are the ones serving tourists, which are not the ones you came for.

Museums are the third. The Uffizi with a two-year-old is not a plan, it is a dare. I am not going to pretend otherwise and I am not planning to try.

And the riposo catches people out. Plenty of smaller shops and some restaurants close from about one until four, which overlaps exactly with the window when you have a napping child and were hoping to go buy nappies. Pharmacies rotate who stays open, and the one that is closed posts the address of the one that is not, which is useful and easy to miss if you are not looking for it.

The dinner problem nobody warns you about

This is the practical thing I wish somebody had put at the top of an article instead of the bottom.

Italian restaurants do not serve dinner early. Kitchens generally open around half past seven, and in the south closer to eight. Italian families eat at nine and their children are there, wide awake and perfectly happy. That is a real and lovely thing about the culture. It is also completely incompatible with a toddler who falls apart at six thirty.

There are three ways around it and I have thought about all of them. You can make lunch the real meal of the day, which is what I plan to do, and eat it at one when every restaurant in the country is open and busy. You can eat at half past seven, right when the doors open, and be the first table in an empty room. Or you can do what Venice makes easy and build dinner out of cicchetti, the small bar snacks on bread that are available all afternoon and cost very little.

Shifting the big meal to lunch is the one I keep coming back to. It also solves the heat, because it puts you indoors and sitting down during the worst two hours of the day.

Where I’d actually go

I would not try to see Italy. I would pick three places and stay put.

Florence

Florence is where I would start, and I would stay in the Oltrarno, the quieter residential side south of the Arno, rather than in the middle of the north side where the crowds are. You can walk across to everything in fifteen minutes and walk back to somewhere calm.

Piazzale Michelangelo is the view everyone wants and it is uphill, which is worth knowing before you set out pushing anything. Mercato Centrale is my answer to feeding a family without committing to a sit-down meal, because everyone picks their own thing and nobody has to sit still. All’Antico Vinaio does paninis big enough to split three ways.

Venice

Venice is the one I have changed my mind about. I used to think of it as the least practical city in Italy. No cars, endless bridges, everything arriving by boat. With a toddler I now think the no-cars part outweighs all of it.

The boats are also the entertainment. A vaporetto down the Grand Canal costs a few euro and is, to a two-year-old, a very long and excellent ride. Burano is forty minutes out and is a village of bright painted houses, which photographs well and, more usefully, is flat and quiet.

Sorrento

Sorrento is small, walkable and sits on a cliff over the bay, and it is the stop where I would stop moving. Piazza Tasso is the center of everything and the town fans out from it. Marina Grande down at the water is a working fishing village with family-run seafood places, and it is a genuinely nice place to spend a slow evening.

It is also the base for Pompeii, twenty-five kilometers away, and for the Capri ferries. I would do one of those, not both, and I would do Pompeii early in the morning before the stone starts radiating heat.

Sicily

Sicily is the one I would add if we had more than a week, and it is the stop that changes the shape of the trip. The others are cities you walk. Sicily is a place you drive, and the food is different enough from the mainland that it feels like a second country.

I would base in Taormina rather than Palermo. It sits above the water with Etna behind it, it is small, and you can walk it. Palermo is the better city and the harder one, with traffic I would not want to manage with a car seat and a nap schedule. Catania I would fly into and leave.

The one thing I would make sure to do is the Valley of the Temples at Agrigento, early, before the sun gets on it. It is open and flat and there is nothing to touch and break, which is a short list in Italy.

What I’d skip

Rome. I know how that sounds.

I like Rome and I have written about it at length. But on a first trip with a two-year-old I would leave it out, and here is the honest reasoning. Rome is big, it is hot, the distances between the things you came to see are long, and almost all of those things are queues in the sun. The Colosseum and the Vatican are both two-hour commitments with very little a toddler can do. You would spend the week managing transit and lines, and you would see Rome badly.

Rome will still be there when Lochlan is seven and can walk all day and actually wants to know what the Forum was. That feels like the right trip for it.

I would also skip the Amalfi Coast drive. It is spectacular and it is a narrow cliff road with switchbacks, summer traffic and nowhere to pull over. A carsick toddler on that road is a bad afternoon for everyone. The ferry does the same coast from the water and is calmer in every way.

Questions I get about Italy with kids

What is the best age to take a child to Italy?

Honestly, any age works, but they are different trips. Under one, they are portable and you are tired. Two to four, which is where we will be, is the stroller-and-naps trip, built around a slower pace and fewer stops. Six and up, you can start doing the museums and the ruins properly. There is no bad age, there is only matching the itinerary to the one you have.

Do I need a car in Italy with kids?

For Florence, Venice and Sorrento, no, and a car is actively a liability in all three. The trains connect them and the historic centers restrict traffic anyway. Sicily is the exception, where you need a car to cross the island, though city driving there is genuinely difficult.

Is Italy expensive for a family?

Less than people expect, if you eat the way Italians eat. Lunch at a market, cicchetti or pizza al taglio for dinner, and gelato in between costs very little. The expensive version of Italy is the one where you sit down for a full dinner service every night. Trains are cheap and booking them a few weeks out makes them cheaper.

Which Italian city is easiest with a toddler?

Venice, for the lack of cars, and Sorrento, for being small enough to cross on foot in twenty minutes. Florence is close behind. The hardest are Rome and Naples, for size and traffic.

Should I bring a stroller or a carrier?

Both, if you can manage it. A carrier for Venice and anywhere with steps, a sturdy stroller with real wheels for Florence and for the long flat stretches. The small folding travel strollers that work beautifully at airports are the ones that struggle most on stone.

When is the best time to go?

May, or late September into early October. You get warm days without the July heat, the crowds are thinner, and you avoid the August closures entirely. I have written the full month by month in the best time to visit Italy with kids, including what closes in August and how the season changes the trip.

I went through all of this same thinking with Portugal earlier this year, and if you are weighing the two, my honest take on Portugal for families covers the other side of it. Portugal is gentler and cheaper. Italy has better trains and better food.

If you want the rest of the planning, I have laid out our 9-day Italy itinerary with kids and where I would actually book in each city.

We are going. I am still working out whether it is May or September, and I will tell you what we decide. If you want to read the rest of what I have written about the country, it is all in the Italy archive.