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Rome with Kids – Travel With Kids Rome

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A wooden sword and a Roman tunic turn the Colosseum’s backyard into a classroom.

Season 5, Episode 3 of Travel With Kids sends the Simmons family into Rome with a simple goal: prove that a city built on 2,000-year-old ruins can still hold a kid’s attention past the first gelato stop. The episode, produced under the family’s TWK Adventures banner, mixes the heavyweight landmarks — the Colosseum, the Roman Forum, Vatican City — with one activity built specifically for children who’d rather swing a sword than read a plaque.

• The episode is part of Travel With Kids Season 5 (“Rome, Italy for Kids”), produced by the Simmons family’s TWK Adventures.
• The centerpiece is Scuola Gladiatori Roma, the gladiator school run by Gruppo Storico Romano on the Via Appia Antica, where kids dress in tunics and train with wooden practice swords.
• The guide also covers the Colosseum, the Roman Forum, and Vatican City, plus practical tips on cobblestones, tour booking, and family dining like pizza and gelato.

Inside the Gladiator School on the Appian Way

The segment’s real hook isn’t a museum — it’s a training camp. Scuola Gladiatori Roma sits along the Via Appia Antica, the same road Roman legions marched on their way south, and it’s run by Gruppo Storico Romano, a group dedicated to recreating ancient Roman military life in detail. Kids get fitted into tunics, handed wooden practice swords, and walked through basic combat drills the way a recruit training for the legions would have learned them, inside a replica camp built to feel like an actual legionary outpost rather than a roadside photo booth.

Wooden swords, cotton tunics, and a replica legionary camp — as close as a family vacation gets to actual gladiator training on the same ground the legions once marched.

From the Colosseum to the Roman Forum

Once the training session wraps, the episode pivots to the sites most families already have circled on their itinerary. The Colosseum and the Roman Forum get framed through an accessible lens aimed at younger viewers — less lecture, more “this is where it actually happened” — which matters when you’re trying to hold a kid’s attention through ruins that don’t always explain themselves. It’s the same instinct that drove the crew’s earlier stop in Venice for family travel in Italy, treating history as something to walk through rather than read about.

Vatican City and the Balancing Act

Vatican City rounds out the landmark tour, and the episode is upfront about the challenge it poses for families: it’s dense, it’s slow-moving, and it doesn’t offer the same hands-on payoff as a gladiator camp. The guide treats it as the trade-off portion of the day, worth the effort but best scheduled around the kids’ energy rather than the other way around.

The Practical Playbook

Beyond the sightseeing, the episode functions as a checklist for parents: book interactive tours ahead of time, don’t overload a single day with back-to-back museums, expect Rome’s cobblestone streets to slow down strollers and small legs alike, and lean on the city’s easy wins — pizza al taglio and gelato — to reset a cranky kid between stops. It’s the same logistics-first approach the family used to break down travel costs in their guide on saving money on family travel.

Rome was one stop in a season that had the Simmons family working their way through Italy’s biggest cities with the same formula — landmark, then activity, then food — and the gladiator school is the clip most likely to get requested on a repeat watch. If nothing else, it’s proof that Via Appia Antica can compete with a theme park for a kid’s attention, wooden sword included.