Italy for children: Big treats for little people (and plenty for parents) in sumptuous Siena

By James Taylor

Published: 13:26 EDT, 14 February 2014 | Updated: 13:26 EDT, 14 February 2014

Previous holidays had been camping in France. Lovely - but we were hankering for china not plastic. Waiters not washing up. Frescos not flysheets. Marble not grass. You could call it anti-camping.

Above all we wanted a holiday for adults with children in tow, not for children with adults on duty.

A haze of history: The past is rarely out of sight in Siena - where the Piazza del Campo dominates proceedings

A friend suggested Siena.

Brilliant idea. Everyone says it is Italy’s best-preserved medieval city. Probably so. Its drains are more beautifully fashioned than most of our homes.

But it must also be one of the world’s best children’s playgrounds.

First there’s the maze. The city centre is a spaghetti-like tangle of narrow red brick streets looped around a giant scallop shell, the piazza (Campo) at the heart of Siena. The weather is balmy. The walls of the old buildings are coloured and warm.

You can aim your juniors in any direction and within two cappuccinos they’ll reappear, breathless as beagles. If you send them off to Gelateria Grom for a caramel ice cream, that will take care of another half an hour. And, crucially, they’ll not be run over because, unlike in Florence, cars, and even scooters, are banned.

They will also be protected by an invisible force, the national religion of modern Italy. Child-worship.

Then, there is the trampoline. Our room in old palazzo the Grand Hotel Continental is bigger than a squash court. Two bathrooms, 12ft windows opening onto the same sea of ochre rooftops that Daniel Craig raced across by motorbike in Quantum of Solace - and split-level sleeping quarters with single beds upstairs and one whopper down below, under a 16th century fresco of Troilus and Cressida.

During one of the grown-ups’ snail-paced breakfasts in the restaurant, the cleaners catch two small acrobats in our room doing somersaults from the upper balcony. Oh dear.

‘No Dad, it’s fine. They thought it was really funny.’

An all-time highlight is the treasure hunt. Normally this would be called a sightseeing tour. We are lucky. We have Paolo Faldoni (recent client: Prince Charles).

He is a cross between the movie star Toni Servillo and the very British Roy Strong, who once ran the V&A. We call Paolo Faldoni the magician. Who else could keep a five-year-old entranced during a six-hour walk around a medieval city?

Making a mess: The prospect of ice cream and excitement is always at hand in the city

The danger is overdosing on the Middle Ages. Some tourists get a nervous twitch at the sight of another dead pope. Paolo carefully avoids this.

He shows our two boys, aged 11 and five, specially designed horse-friendly churches with no steps.

He explains that the famous bareback horse race, the Palio, which takes place around the Campo in August, is the only race in the world where the nags attend holy communion before the pistol. The event is based on competition between the 17 Sienese districts, each with its own animal mascot.

He shows us how to spot rhinos, caterpillars, owls, dragons, giraffes and geese engraved on every doorknocker and street lamp. Then he moves on to Raphael in red leggings, Michelangelo’s self- portrait in marble, a Benetton store with medieval roof paintings, the crooked pillars in the Santissima Annunziata and the steps where  St Catharine knocked out two front teeth.

On the third and last day, we have an art class. Most people would call it a cookery lesson. But Lella Cesari is a food artist.

When she puts the heel of her hand round a ball of flour, semolina and water, presses it into the table, curls her second and third finger round the tongue, flicks it into the ball and squeezes it out again, you are watching 1,000 years of craftsmanship. The Etruscans did exactly the same thing.

We make a fabulous three-course lunch and scoff it with lots of Chianti. Our two small boys spend hours rolling dough into worms.

Who is happier? I am sure I don’t know. But by that stage in the day neither adults or children care.