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On day 4 of our seven days in Rome with Kids we visited the Vatican with kids. We were hosted on our family friendly Vatican tour for kids by Rome4Kids Tours.

I’m lucky enough to have been to the Vatican a few times since my first visit in 2001. I’ve been on a private tour with family, in more recent times with my husband, and even been in the sistine chapel for a private event back when corporate events like that were still the thing to do. What I’d never done before was visit the Vatican with Kids.

My brother and sister in law have visited the Vatican with Kids though, back in 2016 when their kids were 2,4 and 6. They showed us that the Vatican with Kids could be fun, if you used the right tour guide and made sure they were family friendly. So we got back in touch with Rome4Kids Tours and are delighted we did.

Our family friendly tour of the Vatican with kids was our fourth tour of our seven days in Rome with kids. So our kids could possibly have been exhausted and done with tours. Thankfully they weren’t given any chance to be bored or be distracted from their main challenge – a scavenger hunt in the Vatican.

The tour is called ‘The Divine Race Treasure Hunt of the Vatican’ and the children are given a booklet with pictures of things to look out for and check off on the way round. The tour guide aims their talk at the children, explaining the rise of the Roman Empire, the growth of Christianity and creation of the Vatican City. Our tour guide also used an iPad to present some of the information in a much more child friendly way using pictures and animations.

If this was your first tour of the Vatican and you wanted to know way more about the history then this perhaps ins’t the tour for you, but if you want a tour of the Vatican that lasts 3 hours, during which your kids are actively engaged and interested, and you get time to look at some amazing things too, then this family friendly tour of the Vatican is definitely for you.

In previous Vatican visits one of the most amazing things about booking a tour has been the ability to skip the, at times, 3 hour, line to get in. As we visited when visitor numbers are still being kept low due to Covid restrictions there wasn’t a line to skip. We did however experience the Vatican in an incredible way as it felt so quiet and so ridiculously un-busy. If you can fit in a trip to Rome in the next few months before numbers go back up again – do.

Once through the door at the Vatican, we started the treasure hunt. The girls loved this element of the tour, although at times I did think they got so obsessed with finding keys that they didn’t want to listen to the info. We decided they could listen first then hunt.

Some of our favourite bits of the family friendly tour of the Vatican were the Sistine Chapel and St Peters Basilica, the kids couldn’t quite take their eyes of the paintings and neither could we. They also learnt so much that built on the knowledge of our tours earlier in the week of the Colosseum and the city tour in the golf buggy.

In summary, our tour with Rome4Kids was unmissable, a once in a lifetime experience for our mini travellers and ourselves that we couldn’t have had enjoyed without Rome4Kids.

Not only available in Rome, Europe4KidsTours are all now over Italy and also in 13 other European countries. Highly recommended.