Family Hunt for Rome's Hidden Animals, with an Art Workshop

The hunt has one rule that makes it work for children: find the animals. Once you start looking, Rome is full of them. There are bees on fountains, lions at the foot of staircases, dolphins wrapped round tridents, eagles on cornices, a tortoise being helped over a rim, and an elephant in Piazza della Minerva carrying an obelisk, which is where the walk begins. AJ leads it, and the animals are the way in rather than the subject. Each one turns into the reason a building looks the way it does, or which family paid for it, or what a sculptor was showing off about. Children look for the next creature; the explanation arrives while they are still looking. The second half is a hands-on art workshop, so what has been seen gets made rather than only discussed. The group is private, which means the pace matches your children rather than someone else's. If it rains, the walk and the hunt go ahead with umbrellas and the workshop moves indoors, into a local café. The elephant you meet at deserves a minute before anyone sets off. Bernini designed it, Ercole Ferrata carved it, and it was set up in 1667 to carry an Egyptian obelisk dug out of the convent garden next door. The obelisk is a small one, cut in the sixth century BC, and it had stood on this spot in a Roman sanctuary of Isis. Romans have called the animal the pulcino della Minerva, Minerva's chick, ever since, which for an elephant is a joke that has lasted three and a half centuries. The bees belong to the Barberini and turn up on fountains, doorways and coats of arms across the whole centre. Once a child can spot the bee, they are tracing where one family's money went without being told that is what they are doing. The tortoises are an afterthought in the literal sense: the bronze boys on that fountain were cast in the 1580s and the tortoises were added roughly seventy years later, which is why the hands look as though they were carved for something else. Two and a half hours, split between the streets and a table, in a group that is yours alone. Every art material used in the workshop is in the price. What is not is the Pantheon: this is exterior viewing only, so a family that wants to go inside needs a separate ticket bought separately. It is two minutes away, since Piazza della Minerva sits directly behind the building. The square you start and finish in also holds Santa Maria sopra Minerva, the one large Gothic church in Rome, put up over the ruins of a Roman temple that gave it the sopra Minerva in its name. Michelangelo's standing Christ is beside the high altar and Catherine of Siena is buried underneath it. None of that belongs to the hunt, but it is thirty seconds from the statue if you arrive early. Practical points: no more than eight on a booking, prams are fine, infant seats can be provided, service animals are allowed and the ground is flat the whole way. AJ waits in front of the elephant with the sign.