Get your kids into culture in Florence

In our continuing exploration of cities as family holiday destinations, my son Christian and I chose Florence. This turned out to be inspired for a number of reasons. Firstly, this is a compact child-sized city and, providing you stay in a central hotel, everything is in easy walking distance and you quickly get to know your way around. Secondly, with the best pizzas, pasta and ice cream in the world, children eat everything you put in front of them. And, finally, Florence is in Italy and Italians, by definition, love children and welcome them everywhere.

This was clear from the moment we arrived at the hotel. 'Is it just you and the baby?' asked the receptionist. Christian, being eight, was deeply affronted by such a description, but as it soon became obvious that being a bambino in Italy was synonymous with total indulgence, he decided to relax and enjoy it.

We had arrived in the evening, so we decided to set out straightaway in search of dinner. Unavoidably we took in a few sights as our hotel was walking distance to everywhere - five minutes' to Santa Maria Novella, ten to the Duomo, the Uffizi and the Ponte Vecchio. Round the back of the Medici Chapel, we found ourselves a pizza place. This was not, though, your average Pizza Hut but had walls decorated with faux murals, a chef with an eight-foot shovel for his pizzas and a traditional oven with glowing coals. The waiter took Christian off first to the antipasti table where he chose, most untypically, vegetables roasted in olive oil and cleared the plate. After the pizza came the ice cream - none of that boring chocolate or strawberry but such choices as coconut, mango and pawpaw. By the end of our first meal, Christian was already convinced that Florence was cool.

The mayor of Florence recently suggested that as the whole town was a work of art, visitors should pay to enter it. You can see his point. The city is not only a pleasure to walk around, it's crammed with famous churches, statues and museums. At the moment, though, it is an inexpensive city for the sightseer. None of the entrance fees are particularly high and many let children in free (often at the discretion of the ticket office). Even so, how many sights do you take a child to see?

It would certainly be a mistake to spend a whole day going from museum to church to gallery - even the most tractable child would complain and grown-ups suffer from museum overload, too. There is also so much else to do, it makes sense to give more variety to your day.

On our first day, I decided to do the serious sightseeing in the morning and we set off first to the Medici Chapel which we had seen from the outside the night before. You enter the grandest part first, the Cappella dei Principi, commissioned by Cosimo I in 1605, but not finished until 1737, long after Florence's Renaissance heyday. It's a dazzling, vast mausoleum in many colours of marble, lapis lazuli, mother-of-pearl, coral and porphyry. The purists have a tendency to sneer at this rather vulgar display of wealth and power but the size and extravagance are just what appeals to children.

The second part, Michelangelo's cool, perfect and harmonious Sagrestia Nuova, was completed two hundred years earlier and, while this is the one beloved by the purists, it had a quite different effect on Christian. I had primed him before we left that Florence was full of statues that were - that most comic of all conditions from a child's point of view - naked. A couple of days later, onto his third statue of David, he had become quite blasé about nudity but at this stage in the game, bare bottoms still had him in hysterics.

From here, it was a few minutes' walk to the Duomo, the cathedral, with Brunelleschi's breathtaking dome and where Christian lit the first of many candles. Then we went on to the adjacent baptistry with its magnificent bronze doors depicting biblical scenes in such detailed perfection that Michelangelo called them the 'Gates of Paradise'. These were an awe-inspiring finale to our morning's sightseeing and we decided it was time to go in search of Florence's other specialities.

The Via Dei Calzaiuoli runs from the Duomo down to the Ponte Vecchio and it's a great place if you want some pizza (you can buy just one slice as a snack, if you wish), pasta or ice cream. For the latter, I particularly recommend Corona's Cafe or Festival del Gelato (just off the main street) where you can choose from around 50 flavours with a variety of tubs and cones. Christian went for three flavours of ice cream and a cone half-coated in chocolate and studded with nuts and vowed to try every flavour before he went home.

In the afternoon, we caught the bus up to the Piazzale Michelangelo, high on a hill above the south bank of the River Arno. From here you get the most famous view of Florence but it gets even better if you climb the steps to the exquisite Romanesque church of San Miniato al Monte. Built in the 11th century, this is the second oldest church in Florence (after the Baptistery) with a dramatic green, white and black marble facade and a wonderfully preserved interior with a painted timber roof and a 12th century pavement decorated with the signs of the zodiac. There is a small park - Christian managed to find a friendly labrador who enjoyed pine cone football as much as he did - and, of course, plenty of ice cream sellers.