The Merchant Of Venice 2004 Parents Guide

[Kandy Swartzel]

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The Prontopia app is a wonderful resource, providing on-demand, immediate assistance from a pre-vetted Venetian local who arrives within minutes to help you get where you need to go, assist with a bag or a travel need (such as finding an urgent item at the pharmacy). It allows you to focus your attention safely on the kids en route to your lodging or activity.

For children ages 6 to 12, an arts and cultural workshop with Arte al Sole in Venice is a great, experiental way to learn about the city with hands-on activities (and a chance for parents to have a quiet coffee or aperitivo in the meantime!). Kids can learn about the history of Carnevale traditions and then make their own masks; do a family game in a boat along the Grand Canal, pretending to be enterprising merchants and then designing their own sumptuous merchant palazzo; or visit a kid-friendly glassblowing artisan on Murano, creating their own art piece afterward out of Venetian glass.

From April to October, the food and culture club Laguna Libre offers a nice Sunday brunch with family entertainment, plus plenty of space for kids to run around while the parents enjoy a menu of locally sourced ingredients. In Castello, another recommended local neighborhood, children will love to explore the treasures and whimsical setting of the Libreria Acqua Alta bookstore. Used volumes of every kind are stacked floor-to-ceiling in this unique shop, complete with a resident cat. There are even books piled inside a gondola and other quintessential Venetian vessels, both inside and in the garden out back.

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Ready to go beyond average sightseeing and check-the-box travel with your family? Picture your children truly engaged, asking questions, and coming away with a deeper understanding of the world around them. This is the power of Context Family tours.

Samantha, Senior Marketing Manager at Context, spoke with long-time Context customer Erin to get her inside scoop on traveling with children, the importance of kid-friendly tours, and how a good tour experience can make the rest of your trip that much better.

Erin: So [in college], I had no money to travel, no experience with traveling. When I started having kids in my thirties, there was never any money to travel, but I was able to go a few places without my kids through work. Everywhere I went I would see these kids that looked nothing like mine, but also did look like mine; the way a one-year old walked, laughed, and ate. I saw my own kids in others and really took that to heart, that we are sort of all the same.

As we got older, we decided we wanted to travel with our kids. We took our son on a trip abroad by himself when he was in fifth grade. And then we did another trip with our middle daughter, and by then it just sort of snowballed from there.

Travel for us has mostly been about seeing how people are similar and understanding that one place is not better than another; they are simply uniquely different. We're enjoying all the feel good things about travel, but then also raising our kids to see themselves as global citizens. So that's how travel came to be for me.

Samantha: Yeah. I love that. I hope eventually someday to be able to do the same thing. You talked a little bit about how you want your kids to see themselves in the rest of the world and be global citizens. What do you think having the opportunity to travel adds to your kids' lives?

S: That is a huge gift that a lot of people don't have the opportunity to have. And that's unfortunate, but it's really important. When your kids were younger, what were you hoping to get out of your first international trip as a family?

E: When we took Colton to Rome, I was learning alongside him. It was mostly about the world history, but also just seeing the colosseum or, later, the pyramids, and really being able to understand what an amazing feat those venues are. That's what I wanted them to get out of it, that awe and wonder.

S: And it is, Rome is just so wild, you can't even intellectually grasp the importance and how old it actually is. I'm curious, as you saw him walking around the city and seeing things for the first time, what did you see in his face? What happened for him?

E: He was mistaken as a local at the train station in Naples. They have this piano where people will play and then there are people dancing around. There was a group singing local songs and they thought Colton knew what they were singing and they lifted him up in the air.

It has become a game for us to be mistaken for locals when we travel. Some places are harder than others, but a Context tour can help you get the behave-like-a-local vibe going. He saw how fun travel could be when you follow the adage 'When in Rome...'

E: Well, Pompeii struck all of them. There was this colander that exists that they found in Pompeii and it looks like a colander that could be in anybody's kitchen. That's something that they still talk about.

They're not talking about the year that Vesuvius exploded and how many years it took to unearth Pompeii. They're talking about the fact that there was fast food in Pompeii and chalkboards with menus and pictures because not everybody spoke the same language. They're realizing that all of the world has been traveling and migratory since the beginning of time.

S: That's so cool. It's so interesting because in high school they teach you 'This was the ruler and this was the date.' And if they would just tell us stories, things that actually are interesting, we would actually want to know it.

E: You've got Google for the dates and all the rest of that. But to see those types of things also puts the timeline into a better perspective for kids. They start to really understand how long things have been going on.

I think it can be hard as a parent when you've got kids who are younger to educate them to get them ready to go on a trip. To teach kids takes time and thought, and parenting is not the same as teaching. And so the reason that you do it is because Context has packaged this gift for families. Context is the tutor, putting all the good stories and juicy tidbits into one cohesive story. And when that happens, the kids are like sponges.

E: If someone is explaining things well to your kids, they are also explaining things well to the parents! We try to do our Context tours at the beginning of our time in a place because the guides front load a ton of great information for us. We've been prepped for the city by the tour, and that is worth its weight in gold.

In Venice, we did a walking tour and visited a local fish market. Our guide encouraged us to take photos to help remember what was what, told us what merchants to visit, and gave recipes and advice on how to cook things. A few days later we went back to the market and bought a birthday meal to make for our daughter at our Airbnb. So for people who are thinking about the cost, there is also the trade-off benefit.

E: It's not like a one-off. It doesn't exist in a silo, if that makes sense. It's like fertilizer for the rest of your trip. You don't need a Context tour guide with you 24/7, you just need them to help set you up for how the rest of the trip is going to go. And that's always been worth it to us.

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Have your own private guide show you a good time in VENICE on our FAMILY TOURS VENICE! Spend a splendid, unforgettable day in this breathtaking City focusing on what YOU and your family would like to see, not what the bus company wants!

My team and I have specialized in working with families and their children, to make sure you get the very most out of your short stay. We zoom in and find out exactly what the priorities are in order to cover exclusively what is fun for your family!

Rome4KidsTours is specialized in exclusive tours and experiences in Rome and surroundings, all over Italy and Europe. We have the best story tellers that make culture and history fun and meaningful. And we make happy kids that make happy parents.

Known as the capital of industry and fashion, it may not be the first place that comes to mind when it comes to children however, it has a nice center that is fun to visit with little ones and some family attractions worth seeing.

If you have small kids, the piazza will be a real treat as it is car free and it always has very many pigeons who call this large square home: chasing them is easy and guaranteed fun (careful with the Instagrammers though, there many of them too, posing in front of the church!)

The church itself is also fun for kids although more than the inside, the biggest it with kids is usually the facade: it is decorated with over 3500 statues, many of animals real and imaginary and one resembles the statue of Liberty, always fun to spot!

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