Just Had a Baby? Time to Head for Italy
If You Can Swing It, an Italian Vacation Can Be the Cure for the New-Parent Blues
I need only look at my twitter account with its two hundred followers to know that I am the furthest thing from famous. And all I have to do is get my card declined at some restaurant to know that I’m not rich either. But there was one time in my life when I knew what fame was like. I walked down the streets and people stopped and stared. Young women gasped, covered their mouths, and slapped their friends’ arms, pointing at me: “Look! Look!” Shopkeepers ducked into their shops and came out with free gifts. Restaurant owners considered it the highlight of their day when I walked in the door. Groups of people would follow me with their eyes, smiling slightly, hoping I would stop to greet them. Complete strangers would come up to me and start talking. Special tours, free desserts, a glass of wine on the house — and it continued for two and half weeks.
What had I done? I had traveled to Italy with a baby. Twins, in fact, which only amplified the experience.
Now, caring for a baby is hard. I’m not going to discount that. There are the feedings (and diapers). You have to get them washed (and then clothe them again). They have to be carried everywhere. It’s all hard to do, even if you’re at home. To travel with a baby might seem foolish, or even impossible. But babies can, oddly enough, be easier to care for on the road than at home (provided they’re healthy, of course). Trains, buses, walking — babies love motion. Traveling with a baby is an interesting, different way to see a country. And it’s one of the best ways to bring joy — and lots of good memories and photos — into what can otherwise be a challenging period of life.
My wife and I learned about traveling with babies when I was offered a job teaching at the Paideia Institute’s Living Latin in Rome program. My wife was pregnant at the time. But a paying job working with smart, motivated students in Italy is not the easiest thing to turn down. It’s one of the things you hope for as a Latin teacher: “Maybe someday I’ll get paid to go to Italy!” My wife and I were willing to try it. I accepted the job offer, with the caveat that all would depend on a healthy birth and recovery for my wife and child.
Well, the child turned out to be two children — twins. The gemini (as we called them) were happy and healthy five-month-olds when the time came to head for Italy, so off we went.
This article is about traveling with a baby — vacationing. Living and working in a foreign country with babies, which we had to do for six weeks while I was teaching, is a different question. But after my work was completed, we took a two and a half week vacation. We both could give our full attention to our kids. We’d both been to Italy multiple times, but this was probably the best trip we had ever taken, which is saying something, considering 1) we had had some fabulous times in Italy already and 2) many other couples we knew with twins (or even just one baby) were feeling overwhelmed and unhappy at home.
When to go
The best time for traveling with babies is when they’re between three and nine months. Babies under three months are fragile (as are mothers’ recovering bodies during that time). Our twins started to get much more willful around nine months — they wanted to be in charge of where to go and what to do, though that may not be true for all kids. But as kids get older, they are evaluated more and more by their social performance: we expect a two-year-old to say hello, be polite, and if they don’t, you’ll get ugly looks. But babies don’t have to be perfectly behaved, if you’re traveling in a country that loves babies.
Where to go
We’ve generally found Americans friendly to babies, with lots of individual and regional variation. But Italy is entirely different: a passion for bambini can legitimately be called a national characteristic. Even teenage boys would come up to us wanting to hold the babies. While in Italy we could tell when we were in a tourist area because people stopped noticing us: non-Italians took no special interest in our children. Being in classic tourist locales in Italy — the Forum, the Vatican, the Uffizi — means blending back into the crowd. And so your best bet, if you want to live the celebrity breeder lifestyle, is to stay away from tourists. Otherwise, we had good results everywhere in Italy: Florence and Milan, Venice and Siena, Assisi and Rome, as long as we were with Italians, they made us feel like heroes, just because we had babies. As with any foreign country, it works better if you know the language some (we also gave our children Italian names for the trip, “Giovanni” and “Maria,” which endeared them to the Italians all the more). There is one potential downside to this: germophobes are not likely to enjoy Italy with babies. Random Italian grandmas will come up to you and ask to hold your baby, and they’ll think you’re just being coy if you demur.
Some Tips
- Try to book a flight on Alitalia. Why? A lot of Italians fly Alitalia. A friend gave me a special talisman against the evil eye before leaving, because, “Taking five-month-old twins on a nine-hour flight? That entire airplane is going to hate you.” The opposite happened — we were on a flight full of Sicilians, who literally passed our babies around the whole airplane, entertaining them better than we ever had, and considering themselves blessed just to be there. I am not making this up.
- We found it took our kids one day to adjust their schedules one hour. It took them six days to get over the six-hour jetlag. Be prepared, and expect to spend some time walking around the cities at night with wakeful babies. This is your chance to spend the evening in the piazza. Sit by the fountain, or get a table. I guarantee your baby will be a big hit.
- Airbnb or an equivalent site is definitely the way to go. Hotel rooms are rarely spacious enough to be comfortable for a family, and you’ll really need access to a kitchen. Cooking your own meals is cheaper, less stress, and will mean that you get to go grocery shopping with your bambino, which is a great way to meet real Italians.
- Savor it. You’re probably tired anyway, so keep the schedule light. Identify the one or two places you want to see that day, and take lots of pictures. Go out in the morning to shop for lunch or dinner, and see what happens. Talk to people who want to talk to you — kids are a great conversation starter, and one of the best ways to get language practice. You probably feel pretty proud of yourself and your baby anyway (you made it this far!), so just bask in the warmth the Italians will offer you. Your baby will help you slow down: babies love the textures and colors of Italy, and they’ll make you stop so they can touch a column (or a blood orange, or somebody’s clothes).
- You can eat out, but it’s tough to do it more than once a day. We found that our kids were quiet for about a half-hour in a restaurant, but no more. To make this work in Italy, you need to get a menu as you sit down (not the custom!) or even order as you arrive. Have the courses come all at once, and when they arrive, request the check. The Italians will not believe you, but keep asking. Pay as soon as the check arrives, and then you’ll be ready to go as soon as the kids squawk. We were astounded by the welcome Italian waitstaff gave us at every restaurant, even as the kids dropped silverware and crawled on the floor between the tables. The Italians still acted like we were doing them a favor. “I gemelli vostri sono bellissimi!” they would say as the crockery hit the floor. But unlike Catiline we tried never to abuse their patience, and got out fast.
- Stairs, hills, cobbles, cars blocking streets — strollers are not very useful in most of Italy. We carried our babies in packs. Many Italian nonne did not approve — they were convinced that baby carriers were bad for babies, and they told us so. Then they got right back to smiling and gurgling at the babies. Front carriers also give you some measure of control when Italians try to grab your baby and you’d rather they not.
- If you do not dress your baby in pink or blue, which we did not, every Italian will ask: maschietto (baby boy) or feminuccia (baby girl)? You’ve probably never heard those words before in Italian.
- Italian floors are generally stone, concrete, or tile, which makes for hard falls. You’ll become an expert at arranging pillows around your baby, who is just learning to sit up at this time.
- Italian parents would gasp to see that our children did not have coats and warm clothes on, even though it got below 90 degrees at times. This is just a cultural peculiarity. In response we started telling them stories of American winters with snow a meter deep everywhere, and they would reason it out that therefore our children were a different species and needed no coats when it was 89 degrees. This cultural practice might explain why Italians can wear three-piece wool suits with apparent comfort when it is 100 degrees outside.
Just about the only aspect of a classic Italian vacation we did not do is the three-hour meal. We went to San Marco in Florence, hit the museums in Rome, hiked for hours in the Dolomites, took a gondola in Venice, climbed to the top of the Duomo in Milan, prayed in the churches of Assisi, and rode trains everywhere in between. Our kids stared at the oculus of the Pantheon, touched the cracked columns of the Forum, watched the boats cruise under the Rialto, and enjoyed the view from Fiesole. People travel different ways, but we kept with the backpacking lifestyle we had known from college. We brought almost nothing: a large pack on our backs and a baby on our front and that was it. There are lots of great shops for baby clothes and toys in Italy. You can shop as you go if you need something, and have a lot of fun doing it. Instant souvenirs.
Couple all this with the experience of being a celebrity, and Italy with babies is a total win. I’ve heard this can work for families with older kids too. A friend of mine told me about getting on a bus in Rome with her five children, and the entire bus full of Italians burst into applause! This is not the kind of thing that happens in the U.S.
No one is saying that being a parent of an infant is easy. One of our twins didn’t sleep well, and we were tired most of the time (we still are). But if it’s possible for your budget, a trip can be a real way to connect with the joy of parenting. We felt grateful and lucky to be parents while in Italy — which is not always easy to feel. I’ve heard great things about being a tourist with babies in other countries too — Spain and Latin America in particular (I’ll also note that the Chinese people we met in Italy were almost as enthusiastic for our babies as the Italians). I’d love to try it someday. But I can say that traveling in Italy offers a whole lot of consolations for the difficulties of parenting (and we haven’t even gotten to the topic of gelato yet). It’s another one of the glories of spending a life close to the legacies of ancient Greece and Rome: the chance to share it with your babies.
[This is one of a series of articles about Classic Parenting. Links to other articles are below. Another perspective on the same topic, from Sarah Scullin, can be found at Eidolon.]
John Byron Kuhner is the former president of the North American Institute of Living Latin Studies (SALVI) and the editor of In Medias Res.
