The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Don’t forget your sandals – and your sword
An educational journey back through time to experience the sights, sounds and smells of ancient Rome gets a big thumbs-up from Nina Caplan and her band of little Caesars
You can’t be cool and like Latin, according to Reuben. But the subject was nevertheless on this 14-year-old’s syllabus. His sister Ishbel, 12, was learning about ancient Rome – and it’s the height of uncool to fail your exams. So I suggested a time-travel holiday in Italy, to bring to life this classical civilisation which can seem so dusty and distant to the Instagram generation.
Their two younger sisters – Beatrix, nine, and Nora, seven – were drawn in with promises of swordfights; everyone was keen on seeing ash-smothered corpses in Pompeii. But it was probably the prospect of a beach at the end that swung it.
This was my first attempt to dictate our holiday destination: I’m a stepmother, so normally I render unto Caesar, but fortunately Caesar – also known as Craig – likes road travel nearly as much as the Romans did, so off we went.
Our first road led to the Cavalieri, a chic Sixties hotel on a hill overlooking Gladiator lessons with Marcus Aurelius in the Cavalieri Hotel, right; Nina, Craig and family in Italy, below the centre of Rome. We chose it partly because it hosts on-site gladiator lessons, and partly for a bit of glamour for the grown-ups. For the rest of our trip, we turned to the tour operator Scott Dunn to plan a multi-destination trip with, we hoped, sufficient bread and circuses to prevent an uprising. To get them in the mood we watched Ben-Hur, forgetting that it is four hours long: only Reuben was fully awake by the chariot race. But that did mean that when Marcus Aurelius strode into the reception of the Cavalieri, his sandals and tunic were familiar – and so were his weapons. The so-called Pax Romana, said our modern Marcus Aurelius, handing out wooden versions of the gladius (a short, flat sword), required Rome to be eternally ready for war. Entertaining the people with free games in the Colosseum, where slaves fought, sometimes to the death, ensured that everyone remained accustomed to, and favourably disposed towards, violence. This was an attitude our barbarians could relate to perfectly: bashing each other with wooden objects was their kind of lesson. Dubbing them Dwarves numbers one to four, Marcus Aurelius proceeded to teach them to downswipe, sideswipe and generally cause calculated havoc by means of a torrent of abuse (“Disaster!”) and the odd forced push-up. They loved it.
“You are killing flies, right?” he taunted Ishbel, who giggled and sharpened up her moves. Nora so misunderstood the notion of military punishment that she kept dropping and doing one-armed push-ups unasked. Even our hardbitten gladiator was impressed. This lively lesson not only cleared out travel-inflicted cobwebs, but also nicely set the stage for our visit to the Colosseum the next day.
Knowing that travel tires children, we planned our itinerary with Scott Dunn, which offers myriad options to families on the trail of the ancient Romans, and employs experts who also have great experience in engaging with children. Fabio, a former archaeologist, was our guide. He knew which Forum queue would be the shortest – and then showed us inside, where you can see (and smell) the entrance to the Cloaca Maxima, or Great Sewer, still partially in use.
Fabio made the history fun, as did the sheer size of everything: the children liked the huge Forum pillars and loved the arena of the Colosseum, where real gladiators had actually triumphed or perished. Fabio whipped out a pop-up book to show them how it all would have looked 2,000 years ago, and taught them the stonethrowing game with which bored ancient Romans wore away still-visible holes in the Forum steps.
As the family’s only Jew, I grew sentimental about the enormous Menorah (the seven-branched candlestick, symbolising Rome’s military victory over Judea) carved into Titus’s Arch, but the kids had turned their back on the past and were already moving off in search of the aspects of Italian culture that mean most to them: pizza and gelato.
Between forays into the city, we took time out in the Cavalieri pool to remind ourselves that this was a holiday. Since we were atop Monte Mario, Rome’s highest hill, I was able to point out the Circus Maximus that they’d seen in Ben-Hur and St Peter’s – which Fabio had told them was made partly from stones stolen from the Forum, after the fall of Rome. We did some sightseeing (the Spanish Steps, the Trevi Fountain) and some shopping, but no more learning: we were saving our energy for the next stage of our odyssey.