When I started planning our vacation to Italy my teenage sons worried about being trapped for hours in museums. I promised that wouldn’t happen, since I still have flashbacks to my parents dragging my sisters and me on exhaustive and exhausting visits to museums and places like the landscape painter Frederic Church’s house at Olana in Hudson, N.Y.

Our two-week trip turned out to be packed but balanced: Rome was more about the Colosseum and Pantheon and climbing the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica than staring at medieval religious art. Much to my mother’s chagrin, we didn’t even go with her and my stepfather to the Borghese Gallery. Overall, we spent less time in museums than we did outdoors in places like Cinque Terre, Mount Baldo, Maremma’s Etruscan ruins and the Carrara marble quarry.