Hi, we just got back from italy with our children (ages 11 and 7) and we loved our tour of ancient rome with the tour guide we hired. We used a woman named Daniella Hunt, her company is mirabilia urbis walking tours and she can be reached at rome-tours.com We spent a whole day with her touring the colusseum, palentine hill and the roman forum. She was great at keeping the children entertained and explaining things to them so that they understood what they were looking at. She also brought along visual materials that helped them see the "before" and "now". We took a break in the day and she took us to a great tratoria for lunch. She only charged $50 u.S. a hour plus the costs of admissions. I looked into a lot of tours and many of them would not take children or the cost was much higher than what Daniella charged. Scale Reale (although I hear is a great company) would only do a private tour with the kids and wanted $270 for 3 hours for just part of the ancient city. We paid $300 for an entire day (6 1/2 hours). Plus with kids, I highly recommend a private tour, (someone in a group may have gotten inpatient with my 11 yr.old and all his questions.) My husband and I thought we also got a lot out of the tour, we both had seen Ancient Rome before, but with DAnielle we learned a lot more than before. She is very good at touring at whatever level works for your family. She also was great at helping us with restaurant recommendations (we loved Pietros) and books we should buy for the children. hope this helps, itsv

I too must highly recommend Daniela Hunt. We used her to guide us through the Roman Forum and the Colosseum in early June. She was not only very interesting to the adults, but most importantly she kept our 10-year old son engaged on a HOT afternoon. We ended up spending about three hours with her -- about as long as we could withstand the heat. We did these tours the first afternoon we were in Rome; this gave us a nice foundation of Roman history on which to base the rest of our stay. As itsy indicated, some of the tours discouraged taking children, but that was definitely not the case with Daniella -- she welcomed us, and helped us make plans sepcifically for the interests of our son.