Family Holidays to Italy with Teens

A farm-to-table class in Tuscany starts in the garden, picking what's ripe before working out what it becomes, and usually ends with pasta made by hand somewhere in a converted stone farmhouse between the vineyards and olive groves. It's as much about the region as the food. Tuscany's hill towns and slower pace tend to make more sense once a teenager has spent a morning cooking the way locals do. In Rome, the best introduction to the city's food is often the simplest: a walk through a local market like Testaccio or Campo de' Fiori, stopping wherever the queue looks promising, then following it with a plate of something fried, still warm, eaten standing up the way Romans do.

Painting a fresco using the same techniques used centuries ago gives teenagers a proper feel for how much skill sat behind the art they've been looking at all week. A VR experience paired with a trip to Pompeii or the Colosseum brings both back to life and how they looked before. On the Amalfi Coast, a session on shooting and editing a proper reel turns a teenager's own phone habit into a way for them to document the holiday in their own unique style.

A zipline through the Dolomiti Lucane mountains in Basilicata covers ground on foot that would otherwise take a full day, running high above a landscape of dramatic gorges and mediaeval hill towns that most visitors never see. A session with a professional F1 driver, arranged near one of Italy's motor-racing circuits, gives teenagers a taste of speed most will only otherwise see on a screen, and a sense of the precision behind it. And a private yacht from Sorrento to Capri swaps the day-tripper route for the island's quieter side, reaching sea caves and coves along the coastline that the larger tourist boats can't get close to.

Vintage shopping and vintage cars sit well together here. The Amalfi Coast still carries its 1950s Hollywood glamour, the era that made it famous across the world. A vintage minivan tour through Rome turns a street food crawl into something with a bit more theatre. And in Matera, a ride through the ancient cave dwellings by vintage Piaggio Ape takes in some of Italy's most recognisable film locations along the way.