PIEMONTISSIMO READING
Visiting Piemonte With Kids
Why It’s Surprisingly Family-Friendly
Piemonte might not be the first place that springs to mind when planning a family holiday in Italy. After all, much of the region’s international reputation revolves around Barolo, white truffles, long lunches and restaurants where somebody appears at your table carrying a wine list the size of a small novel. At first glance, it sounds considerably better suited to couples than children. But, Piemonte is surprisingly brilliant with kids.
We say this as a fairly typical child-free thirty-something couple with a dog. We certainly can’t claim firsthand expertise in travelling around Piemonte with toddlers in tow. But almost all of our friends here have children, and they love it here too.
Part of the reason is that Piemonte doesn’t necessarily separate adult life from family life. Children come along. They come to restaurants, village festivals and aperitivo. They even come to wineries. The kids stay out playing in the piazza in the evening while their parents have dinner.
And once you start looking beyond the wine and dine family experiences, there is actually an enormous amount for families to do.
Italy is incredibly child-friendly
This is probably the most important thing to understand before visiting Piemonte with kids: Italians love children.
Of course that’s a sweeping generalisation, but compared with many places in northern Europe or in the US, children are much more integrated into everyday social life here. You rarely get the impression that bringing a child into a restaurant somehow inconveniences everyone else in the room.
One thing that can initially confuse foreign visitors is the lack of children’s menus. Restaurants in Piemonte rarely have a separate menu containing chicken nuggets, fish fingers and chips. This does not mean the restaurant isn’t suitable for children. Quite the opposite.
Ask whether the kitchen can make a simple pasta al pomodoro, pasta al ragù or something else pastabased your child will eat and they will usually be perfectly happy to help, even if it doesn’t appear anywhere on the menu.
And because children are so routinely included in meals and social occasions, eating out as a family generally feels remarkably normal. The only adjustment for families from northern Europe can be timing. Dinner in Italy happens later (read; restaurants rarely open the kitchen before 19:00), and in summer it’s perfectly normal to see children running around a piazza long after some visiting parents would normally have started the bedtime routine.
Yes, you can visit wine country with children
You may have imagined your holiday in Piemonte involving leisurely afternoons visiting wineries and tasting Alta langa and Barolo. Having children doesn’t necessarily mean replacing those plans with seven consecutive days at a water park.
Wine here isn’t simply a tourist attraction. It is an agricultural industry and a way of life, and many of the wineries around Langhe, Roero and Monferrato are still family businesses themselves. As a result, children are often welcome to accompany their parents on winery visits.
Obviously, use some common sense. There is a difference between taking your children along for a relaxed visit to a family cantina and expecting a toddler to remain fascinated throughout a three-hour vertical tasting of Barolo vintages.
But don’t automatically assume that having children means wineries are off limits. When booking, simply tell the winery that you’ll have children with you and ask whether the particular tasting or tour is suitable for them. When we have been to wine tastings with our friends with children they have usually enjoyed the tour of the grounds, tasting some grapes from the vines and then being sat with us during the tasting with an ipad or crayons.
In our experience, Piemonte’s wine culture is considerably less precious than outsiders sometimes imagine.
Go truffle hunting
If wine tasting fails to excite the younger members of the family, we have an alternative: Tell them you’re going into the woods with a dog to hunt for buried treasure.
Truffle hunting is one of Piemonte’s great traditions, particularly around Alba, the Langhe and Monferrato. You head into the woods with a trifulau, a truffle hunter, and a specially trained dog, traditionally called a tabui, and learn how the dogs locate truffles hidden beneath the ground.
It’s one of those rare activities that manages to be quintessentially Piedmontese without being exclusively aimed at adults.
The actual tradition of truffle hunting and extraction in Italy was added to UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2021, and guided truffle-hunting experiences are widely available around the region.
Just remember that truffles are seasonal, and check exactly what type of hunt is being offered when you book. Some tourist experiences use simulated hunts so that visitors can experience the tradition regardless of whether a truffle happens to cooperate that morning.
Piemonte has some seriously good swimming pools
When the temperature reaches the mid-30s in July, however, cultural enrichment may suddenly become significantly less important than finding a large body of cold water. Fortunately, Piemonte does summer swimming rather well.
One of the best options around Asti is Astilido Water Park. Calling it a swimming pool doesn’t really do it justice. It’s a 15,000-square-metre summer water park with five larger slides, including the wonderfully unsubtle Kamikaze, as well as a beach-style lagoon, green areas and a dedicated children’s pool with mini-slides and the Fantacastello.
It’s exactly the sort of place where you can sacrifice an entire day to the children and earn enough parental credit for tomorrow’s winery visit.
Around Alba, we particularly like Tennis Club Alba. This is a rather different proposition. Set amongst the hills above Alba, it has much more of a relaxed resort feeling, with a 25-metre pool, a separate small pool for children, sunbathing areas, a bar and a restaurant overlooking the pool and surrounding Langhe.
In other words, it’s a swimming-pool day that adults don’t necessarily have to endure on behalf of their children.
There are outdoor pools scattered throughout Piemonte, so during a summer trip it’s always worth checking what’s available near where you’re staying.
Horse riding, walking and simply being outside
One of Piemonte’s greatest advantages for families is also the most obvious one: there is an awful lot of countryside.
Horse riding is available throughout many of the rural areas, particularly around the Langhe and Monferrato, and is a lovely way for older children to experience the landscape without another museum or historic church being involved.
Then there are walking and cycling routes, forests, rivers, parks and, further north and west, the Alps.
Piemonte’s official tourism organisation actively promotes the region as a family destination, with activities ranging from easy hikes and cycling to farms, water parks and outdoor sports. And you don’t necessarily need to organise every hour.
Sometimes a walk between villages, an agriturismo with animals, a picnic or an afternoon outside is enough.
Summer brings the luna park
This is something we rarely see mentioned in international guides to Piemonte. During summer, towns and villages across the region hold their local feste, sagre and patron-saint celebrations, and many are accompanied by some form of travelling luna park.
For a few days, an otherwise unremarkable car park or square can suddenly fill with flashing lights, children’s rides, bumper cars, music and stalls. Then, almost as quickly as it appeared, it’s gone again.
These aren’t necessarily attractions you’d travel across Piemonte specifically to visit. They’re part of local summer life, and that’s precisely why they’re fun.
If there’s a festival happening in the town where you’re staying, go. Eat something from a food stall, have a drink, let the children go on the rides and experience a little slice of the Piemonte that people actually live in.
And then there are the lakes and mountains
One problem with talking about Piemonte is that people tend to picture the vineyard-covered hills around Alba and assume the entire region looks like that. It doesn’t.
Head north and you reach lakes including Lago Maggiore and Lago d’Orta, where summer can revolve around swimming, boat trips, islands and being near the water. Head towards the Alps and you have another holiday entirely.
In summer there are mountain walks, refuges, cable cars, cycling and outdoor activities. In winter, Piemonte becomes one of Italy’s major skiing regions.
This makes the region particularly good for a longer family holiday because you don’t necessarily have to choose between an Italian food-and-culture trip and an outdoors holiday. You can have both.
Piemonte with a pushchair requires some determination
Now for the less glamorous bit. Piemonte may love children, but its medieval villages were not designed with a Bugaboo in mind.
Hilltop towns involve hills. Streets can be cobbled. Pavements in smaller villages range from narrow to theoretical, and beautiful old buildings don’t always have lifts. If you’re travelling with a baby or toddler, a good carrier may therefore become your best friend.
You’ll also find rural Piemonte considerably easier with a car. Trains are useful between the larger towns and cities, but many of the villages, wineries, agriturismi and countryside experiences that make this region special aren’t conveniently connected by public transport. If you’re renting a car make sure to beforehand book a child’s seat, we have heard that they are not always that easy to get hold of once you’re here.
And then there is the heat. July and August can be quite hot, particularly in the lower hills and plains. With young children, we’d plan outdoor activities for mornings and evenings and reserve the hottest part of the afternoon for a pool, a long lunch, a nap or somewhere with air conditioning. Luckily, taking life very slowly between lunch and late afternoon is hardly incompatible with Italian culture.
So, is Piemonte good for a family holiday?
We think the mistake is looking for a destination where every attraction has been specifically created for children. That’s not really how Piemonte works. Instead, children are included in the life that’s already happening here.
You can spend the morning hunting for truffles with a dog, have lunch at a proper Piedmontese restaurant, cool off in a swimming pool during the afternoon and find yourself at a village sagra with bumper cars that evening. The next day can involve a winery. The day after that, horses.
And if everyone is getting tired of vineyard-covered hills (something we personally struggle to understand, but apparently it is possible) you can head for Turin, the Alps or the lakes.
Piemonte doesn’t feel like a giant family resort. And that’s exactly what we like about it. You don’t have to spend your holiday choosing between doing things for the adults and doing things for the children. Most of the time, you can simply bring them along and they will have a great time.
