We’ve taken the children for walks since they were tiny – proper walks, with rucksacks, cagoules and appropriate footwear. And, yes, we’ve met with recalcitrance from time to time, but we’ve always managed to have enough fun along the way to edge out memories of sulkiness. Borrowing friends’ dogs has been the greatest bonus recently, but when the children were very small, we would secretly take along a favourite toy. One of us would stride ahead to hide it, legs dangling, on the branch of a tree, then we’d engineer some delay – an untied shoelace or something – to allow the kids to spot it inexplicably sitting there, waiting for them. The rest of the walk would be spent discussing how on earth that bear or pig or whatever could possibly have got out of the house without our knowing about it.
The reason it mattered went deeper than the fact that we wanted a walk and we couldn’t leave them behind. Because when you’re walking with your child, side by side and with nothing to distract you, rarely even making eye contact because you’re too busy looking at the view or the uneven ground, then you are properly together. You may share little but a companionable silence (though, in my experience, you almost always end up talking about stuff that’s big and complicated and unexpected), but you’re together. Listening to each other. Sharing an experience. Creating memories. And it doesn’t get any better than that.
So I wanted Tilly to come on a walking holiday with me. She’s 13 now, and frankly there are so many more important things for a girl such as her to be doing, but she was persuadable, I felt sure. I just needed the hook, the teenage equivalent of the teddy in the tree. And then it came to me.
“How about a walking holiday abroad?” I suggested.
“Where?”
“Rome? Ancient sites, beautiful piazzas…” – and here I untied my metaphorical shoelace to allow her to spot the toy – “maybe some shopping.”
Bingo. She was in. And I would have her to myself for three glorious days.
Because this was a walking holiday, I wanted to make sure we clocked up some miles. I got hold of some Jawbone wristbands – pedometers are so last decade – which add up your footsteps and send the total to your phone. We decided we’d aim for seven miles a day, based on the length of a favourite walk in Somerset that is not so far as to be a chore, but far enough to make you feel smug at the end of it.
Now this was all very laudable, but I’d failed to consider two salient points:
1) Walking seven miles on an autumnal day in the West Country is not the same as walking seven miles in Rome in the middle of August. Rome is, if you’ll permit the meteorological jargon, arse-frazzlingly hot and humid. Indeed, it occurred to me after only a few hours that one of the main reasons there are so many clothes shops in Rome is that you’d need an extensive wardrobe if you had to get changed four times a day. After our first walk, I had to peel my T-shirt off my skin. The fibres appeared to have melted into my epidermis. This is not a problem I’ve ever had after a ramble on Exmoor.
2) Seven miles a day is a doddle in the right footwear. But it turns out you can’t wear 20-year-old walking boots in a city of stylish women and luxury shoe shops. “You just can’t, Mum. It’s embarrassing.” I’m paraphrasing, but you get the idea. The whole enterprise was starting to look ill-conceived.
We arrived on an early flight, dumped our bags and decided to start right away. We walked from the Via Veneto, where our hotel was, to the Spanish Steps. This glorious baroque stairway mounting the hill between the Piazza di Spagna and the Piazza Trinità dei Monti has been a shrine for poetry fans since Keats and Shelley went to live (and, in the case of the former, to die) here. It wasn’t a massive first hike, but long enough for me to bang on about the Romantics, and for Tilly to clock the shops she wanted to come back to over the next couple of days. On the way, we’d been talking about the Grand Tour (well, I had and she’d been pretending to listen), so I thought it would be appropriate to have a light lunch in Babington’s Tea Rooms. Opened in 1893 by two Englishwomen shrewdly aware of their countryfolk’s innate resistance, when in Rome, to eating Italian food like the Romans do, Babington’s is a quaint historical throwback. The whole experience was pleasantly odd, like being in Bettys of Harrogate during some freak heatwave. But for Tilly, it was an opportunity for a little filial outrage.
“An English tearoom?”
“Yes,” I confirmed.
“Really? And if I’d suggested going to Nando’s, what would you have said?”
“I would have said, I don’t think they have Nando’s in Rome.”
“Really?” she said again, with even more scepticism than before. “I don’t think so. You would have said…” (And here she did a scathingly accurate impersonation of me. Seriously, if ever I’m not available for a voiceover, no one would notice the difference.) “You would have said, ‘Darling, we’re in Rome. One of the culinary capitals of the world. We can’t just eat the sort of stuff you can get at home.’ And I would have said, ‘We can get pasta at home’ and you would have said, ‘That’s not the point’ and I would have said, ‘Well, it kind of is’ and you would have had to agree. But then we would have eaten something typically Roman and it would have been great.”
Yup. I couldn’t argue. That’s exactly how it would have gone. So, several more miles and a couple of changes of clothes later, we found ourselves in La Fraschetta di Castel Sant’Angelo, a far more typically Roman joint: bright orange walls, paper table cloths and bowls of amatriciana and arrabbiata to knock your socks off. It was cheap, too, which was a mercy, since on the way there Tilly had spotted several shops selling the sort of clothes, hair products and earrings that she “actually really needed”.
The next morning, we were already feeling the effects of walking on cobbles in thin-soled flats. Not only that, but I’d been forced to break the news to Tilly that today’s shopping would have to be of the window variety, after blowing pretty well all of our spending money in the first afternoon. But she’s an actor’s daughter – she’s used to there being money one day and none the next – so she gamely suggested we start off by walking down Via Condotti, on the basis that there would be nothing there we could possibly have afforded anyway. Via Condotti is an elegant thoroughfare, crammed with shops such as Prada, Gucci and Cartier that are way too scary to go into. We passed a merry hour or so looking at window displays and pretending we wouldn’t be seen dead in this stuff, while silently wondering how one might conceivably earn enough to buy it. I did have an affordable treat up my sleeve, though.
Hidden away in the Largo di Torre Argentina, among the ruins of the theatre of Pompey where Caesar was killed, is a cat sanctuary. You’re not allowed near the crumbling masonry – that’s strictly cat territory – but you can go into the sanctuary itself and visit its more vulnerable residents, hobbling on three legs or with blinded eye-sockets covered in fur. The whole place seems to be clean and caring, in spite of having no funding other than donations. Honestly, I’m not much of a cat person, but Tilly fell madly in love with a cute little scrappy thing, and didn’t want to leave.
Anything would have been a disappointment after that, I suppose, but I was hoping for a better response to the Pantheon. This extraordinary church, famed for its massive rotunda, has been in continuous use for nearly two millennia. But the hole in its roof – which I think we can assume was very much a design feature – didn’t impress my daughter.
“What happens when it rains?” she sniffed. “They really didn’t think that through.”
Her mood was restored, though, by the afternoon’s main event, the Imperial Forum. It’s a massive site crammed with the tumbledown remnants of a noble city. Its pathways may be dessicated and shade-free, but tourists swarm here even in the heat of the midday sun, to gawp at how unfathomably, well, old everything is.
We’d actually brought the children here when they were little, and by a strange coincidence the way we had brought it to life was through shopping. We’d pretended to be a family of ancient Romans, going to the forum for a little light praying and to stock up on groceries. I remember handing Tilly an invisible bag of denarii and sending her off to get fish – “But not from Marcus Lucilius. Last time it was full of maggots.” It had kept her busy for hours, running in and out of doorways and coming back with bundles of imaginary food. I knew that strategy wouldn’t work any more, but this time she was gripped by the scale of the place, the mysterious gaps between what’s known and what’s unknown, and the sheer unlikelihood that it could have lasted this long.
We’d achieved our mileage, so for more sedentary sightseeing we ate that night in a restaurant overlooking the Colosseum. Aroma is on the rooftop terrace of a smart hotel. The food was cooked with extraordinary skill, the wine was indigenous and irresistible, and we felt genuinely welcome.
We decided, for our final day, to cut ourselves a little slack: five miles would be plenty. We headed back to Piazza di Spagna, chiefly so that I could visit my mother’s favourite shop – Sermoneta, purveyor of the softest leather gloves in the most sumptuous range of colours. She’s always been a demon for a matching accessory, and besides, I felt that this was an opportunity for Tilly to learn the enduring importance of buying gifts for your mother. After a little welcome shade in the formal elegance of the Pincio gardens, we ventured back into retail heaven; then, remembering we were no richer than we had been the day before, decided to settle for a drink instead. On the chic Via del Babuino, Tilly spotted a bizarre-looking cafe crammed from floor to ceiling with statuary, busts and friezes. It turned out to have once been the workshop of Antonio Canova (remember the Three Graces, saved for the nation a few years ago? That’s the chap) and it looks for all the world as if he still works there. There aren’t enough cafes in the world boasting 8ft statues of cardinals, in my opinion. Interior designers, take note.
By the end of those three days, we had talked and listened, gossiped and bickered, made each other laugh and created memories that, while they may not outlast the Eternal City, will certainly keep us going for a while. And we had walked a total of 20 miles (having got lost on our five-mile day and ended up doing six) in scorching heat and inappropriate shoes. A walking holiday in Rome: it wasn’t such a stupid idea after all.
Factbox
The trip was provided by Kirker Holidays; three nights B&B for the price of two at Rome’s Regina Hotel Baglioni costs from £789 per person (saving £220 until 2 April), including flights, private transfers, entrance tickets to the Vatican museums and Sistine Chapel or the Villa Borghese, Kirker Guide Notes to restaurants and sightseeing, and the services of the Kirker concierge. Dinner at Palazzo Manfredi’s Aroma restaurant costs from €125 a head, excluding wine, for seven courses
