C’era Una Volta – Educational Farm

The C’era Una Volta educational farm is a private facility located in the Rome sector of the Litorale Romano State Nature Reserve, a short distance from the village of Ostia Antica, and it works on two parallel tracks: on one side the farm proper, with domestic animals that live in open spaces and let you approach without drama, on the other an artistic vocation that brings shows, courses and workshops inside the enclosure. It's not a zoo, it's not a theme park, it's not a protected area run by a public body: it is a privately owned place that opens its gates to school groups and families and organizes itself to welcome them. The difference matters more than it seems, because it changes how you book, changes what the children see and changes the kind of attention asked of the adults who accompany them.

Anyone who gets there for the first time almost always makes the same error of perspective: they imagine an attraction with a ticket office, signs, marked routes and continuous hours. Here the mechanism is different. A day at the farm is an appointment, not an admission. You agree beforehand, it is built around a group, and the person who welcomes you is the same one who then guides, explains and answers the questions. This model, which spread in Italy starting from the last decades of the 20th century on the model of Belgian, French and German experiences, has a precise logic: bringing city children back into the cycle of farm production and the relationship with animals, not by showing them an enclosure, but by letting them into the daily work.

The two activities that over time have made this farm recognizable are goat milking and the walk with the donkeys. They seem like minor details and instead they are the heart of the matter, because they are two gestures that a child raised in an apartment has never done and that require something places for children rarely ask for today: patience, steady hands, silence. For those thinking in terms of day trips out of town with little ones in Lazio, the same family of experiences also includes the Il girotondo degli animali Educational Farm, La Selvotta Nature Park and VoloAlto Nature Park, all private facilities that work by reservation and with organized groups.

Where C’era Una Volta Educational Farm is and how you really get there

Geography is the first thing to sort out, because it is the one that ruins the most days. The reference declared by the facility is the Litorale Romano Nature Reserve and the proximity to the village of Ostia Antica. We are therefore in the southwestern sector of the municipal territory of Rome, inside Municipio X, the only Roman municipio that faces the Tyrrhenian Sea directly and the only one that develops entirely outside the Grande Raccordo Anulare. The municipio runs from the mouth of the Tiber, to the northwest, to the border with Pomezia, to the south, and includes urban zones that anyone who has driven around here knows at least by name: Ostia Antica, Lido di Ostia, Acilia, Infernetto, Casal Palocco.

This is the wide context. The exact spot, though, has to be asked directly of the facility, and not out of laziness: in this strip of territory the farms and accommodation facilities are almost always located along secondary, consortium or local roads, which carry repeated names and which satellite navigators interpret creatively. A street with the same name can appear twice a few kilometers apart, and the right gate can be hundreds of meters from the point the phone indicates as the destination. Whoever books should have the exact road reference, the last useful junction and the color or mark of the gate given by voice: these are the three pieces of information that solve 90 percent of delays.

By car: the routes that work

Anyone leaving from the center of Rome has essentially two ways of heading down toward this coastal strip. The first is Via Cristoforo Colombo, which starts at EUR and runs straight down to the Ostia seafront, cutting the Castel Fusano pine forest in two. It is wide, fast on the free stretches and deadly at rush hour, when commuter traffic saturates it in both directions. The second is Via del Mare, which runs parallel to the railway and passes right next to the village of Ostia Antica: it is the historic road, the one that links Rome to the mouth of the Tiber, and for those whose reference is the village it remains the most logical.

Those coming from outside the city will use the Grande Raccordo Anulare and exit toward the Colombo or toward Via del Mare depending on the quadrant they come from. Those coming from the north, from Fiumicino or from the airport, will instead come down the coastal road and cross the Tiber in the Isola Sacra area: a short route on paper, much less short in reality, because the bridges over the Tiber at that point are few and become bottlenecks.

Once you leave the main routes, the part that really counts begins. The minor roads of this sector are paved but narrow, with packed-earth shoulders and drainage ditches at the sides, a legacy of the land reclamations that between the 19th and 20th centuries made habitable an area that for centuries had been marsh. There is almost no public lighting anywhere. On damp autumn and winter mornings fog rises from the canals and cuts visibility abruptly. It's best to allow a good quarter of an hour more than the time promised by the phone app, because on those roads you don't travel at the speed the software imagines.

It isn't worth building expectations about parking: in facilities of this kind it is almost always a dirt or grassy patch in front of the gate, with no lines and no attendant. The useful question to ask when booking, especially for schools, is whether there is room to maneuver a bus, because in this stretch of Roman countryside the narrow roads make maneuvering a long vehicle a serious problem. Anyone driving a low car should be careful after rain: the ground here holds water and the puddles hide the ruts left by farm vehicles.

By public transport: what nobody explains

The line that serves this whole territory is the old Roma-Lido, opened on August 10, 1924 and renamed Metromare starting in 2022, when management passed from ATAC to Astral for the infrastructure and to Cotral for operation. It starts from Porta San Paolo, where it connects with metro line B at the Piramide station and with regional trains at Roma Ostiense, and in a little over half an hour it reaches the sea. The reference stop for the village is Ostia Antica, which until 1939 was called Ostia Scavi and which was destroyed by the Allied bombings between 1943 and 1944 before being rebuilt.

Here comes the uncomfortable part. Getting off at the Ostia Antica station means finding yourself a few minutes on foot from the village and the archaeological area, and this works very well for those visiting the excavations. To reach a facility located in the surrounding countryside the situation changes, because the last stretch must be covered by car, by taxi or by private vehicle: there is no bus network designed to bring individual visitors to a country gate. Anyone who doesn't drive and still wants to get there should do two things: ask the facility, when booking, which solution they usually recommend, and allow for a final transfer that has to be paid for. Stating this in advance avoids the classic scene of the group getting off the train and discovering they still have kilometers ahead.

By bicycle, for those who are fit

This strip of territory lends itself to cycling more than people think, because it is completely flat and because the bike path that runs along Via Cristoforo Colombo and the one that follows the Tiber allow you to cover long stretches away from traffic. The limit is the wind: on this coastal plain the maestrale and the libeccio make themselves felt, and a route that seems easy on the way out becomes, on the way back, an exercise in stubbornness. Those cycling with children should assess the real distance and not the theoretical one, and keep in mind that the last kilometer on a dirt road, with a trailer or a child seat, is the hardest stretch of the day.

What C’era Una Volta Educational Farm really is: a private facility, not a public park

It's worth being explicit on a point that generates recurring misunderstandings. The fact that the facility is inside the perimeter of the Litorale Romano State Nature Reserve does not make it a public asset. The reserve, established by ministerial decree on March 29, 1996 after a first attempt in 1987, covers more than 16,000 hectares divided between the municipalities of Rome and Fiumicino and includes within it lands of every kind: archaeological areas, state-owned pine forests, wetlands entrusted to LIPU and WWF, cultivated fields, private houses, farms. Being inside the reserve means being subject to protection restrictions, not being open to the public by definition.

Everything else follows from this. There is no free entry you can exercise by showing up at the gate, and there are no continuous hours valid all year. The access conditions, the opening days, the fees and the duration of the activities are decided by whoever runs the facility and must be asked directly through the official channels, which for this business are the Facebook page fattoriadidatticaceraunavolta and the phone and messaging contact listed on the page itself, the number +39 373 700 0312. Whoever writes or calls gets in a few minutes answers that no third-party page can guarantee are up to date.

The educational farm model in Italy

To understand where you are, it helps to know how the category works. An educational farm, in the current definition, is a business that alongside its main activity equips itself to carry out teaching and training activities, welcoming school groups and families. The phenomenon began in the last decades of the 20th century in several European countries with a double aim: supporting the agri-food sector with a supplementary activity and bringing city kids back closer to the rural products and traditions of their own territory. In Italy the model has been organized at the regional level: facilities register in regional registers or lists and sign a charter of commitments covering safety, hygiene and health rules, operator training and a clear description of the educational offer.

This regulatory architecture has a practical consequence for those who book. It means that when you ask a facility what its position is with respect to the regional lists you are not asking an impertinent question, but the same question a school office asks before authorizing an outing. It also means that the program of a day is not improvised: it has a structure, a time frame, a stated educational goal. And it means, finally, that the operator who welcomes the group is not a generic entertainer but a figure who has done that training.

Two souls in the same enclosure

The particularity of this business compared with other educational farms in Lazio is the declared presence of an artistic dimension alongside the agricultural one: shows and courses that take place in the same spaces where the animals live. It doesn't happen often. In most cases educational farms stay anchored to the story of production, the vegetable garden, the orchard, the milk cycle, the processing. Here, next to that story, there is a theatrical use of the space, which in practice shifts the center of gravity of the experience: not only learning how an animal works, but also staging something inside a place that seems made to be a natural stage.

The actual program, the frequency of the initiatives and the calendar of artistic activities change over time and must be checked case by case with the facility. What can be said with confidence is that the coexistence of the two souls explains why a day here can look quite different from a day at another educational farm, and why it's worth asking in advance what kind of activity is planned on the chosen date.

The free-roaming animals and why this changes the experience

The feature the facility declares most insistently is the presence of free-roaming animals, docile and gentle, which let the visitor get familiar with them without barriers. Put like that it sounds like a promotional formula, but it describes a precise and fairly rare setup. In a zoo or a wildlife park the animal is behind a fence and the visitor looks at it. In a facility with free-roaming animals the relationship is reversed: it's the animal that decides whether to come closer, how long to stay, when to move away. The child goes from the role of spectator to that of interlocutor, and this produces very different reactions from child to child.

The fact that the animals are used to people does not mean they behave like plush toys. A donkey that gets tired walks away. A goat that doesn't want to be milked moves its leg. A hen pecked by another hen screeches and runs off between the legs of those present. All of this, which to the eyes of an urban adult looks like disorder, is instead exactly the educational content of the day: a child learns that a living being has its own will, that the relationship has to be built and that hurry is counterproductive. No documentary produces the same effect.

Goat milking

Milking is the gesture almost all children remember months later. The domestic goat descends from the wild goat of Asia Minor and was domesticated around 10,000 years ago in the area of the Zagros mountains, in Iran, by populations looking for a reliable source of meat, milk and hides: it is therefore one of the animals that have accompanied human history the longest. Gestation lasts roughly 150 days, twin births are the norm, and a goat in lactation can produce around two and a half liters of milk a day over a season of about 300 days. These are numbers an operator can tell while the child has their hands on the udder, and in that context they stick in the memory in a way no printed sheet achieves.

Whoever accompanies a group will do well to prepare the children for two details that always throw them. The first is the temperature: freshly milked milk is warm, and the expectation of a child raised with a refrigerator is exactly the opposite. The second is the goat's pupil, horizontal and rectangular, an adaptation to life on rocky terrain that serves to widen the field of vision: it is the thing that most often makes the smallest ones take a step back, and explaining it beforehand turns fright into curiosity.

The walk with the donkeys

The other activity the facility declares as its own is the walk with the donkeys. Here too it helps to know who you are dealing with. The domestic donkey descends from the African wild ass and has been used by humans since at least the third millennium BC, when in the Middle East it was the main means of transporting goods, even before the camel. It is smaller than the horse, more compact, sturdier and considerably more cautious. The proverbial stubbornness, which in the Italian language has become an insult, is actually a refined instinct for self-preservation: it is hard to force a donkey to do something that is, or seems to it, contrary to its own interests. A frightened horse bolts. A frightened donkey plants its feet.

This characteristic is precisely the reason the donkey works so well with children and with fragile people, so much so that therapy assisted by these animals has a name of its own, onotherapy, and is practiced with recognized results. An animal that doesn't bolt and can't be forced obliges whoever leads it to lower the pace and negotiate. For an overstimulated child this is almost a shock therapy in reverse. Whoever takes part in a guided walk will discover that the donkey's time is slower than their own, and that the only way to move forward is to accept it.

A curiosity about C’era Una Volta Educational Farm

The curiosity concerns the ground under your feet, and almost nobody tells it to children because it seems too complicated. This whole strip of countryside between the village of Ostia Antica and the sea did not exist, in its current form, until little more than a century ago. It was marsh. The mouth of the Tiber shifted several times over the centuries, and the decisive blow came in 1557, when a ruinous flood permanently diverted the course of the river and turned the surrounding areas into unhealthy swamps. From that moment and for almost 400 years this plain was land of malaria, of transhumant shepherds and of isolated farmhouses, abandoned in summer and visited only for winter grazing.

The landscape a child crosses today to reach the farm, with its regular fields, drainage canals and straight roads, is therefore a landscape designed on a drawing board between the end of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th. The reclamations that made the territory habitable were carried out largely by farm laborers who came from outside the region, in particular from Romagna, who settled permanently, giving rise to a farming community with accents and surnames that in this area still sound different from Roman ones. The green that seems spontaneous is the result of a hydraulic remodeling: every ditch has a name, every canal a calculated slope.

This history has a concrete effect on the visit, and it's worth pointing it out to the children when you are on site. The reason the ground here stays soft for a long time after rain, the reason certain fields lie lower than the road, the reason in autumn the fog rises early in the morning and dissolves by around 10 in the morning: it all comes from the fact that you are walking on a plain wrested from the water and kept dry by a drainage system. A farm that works in this context is not a generic bucolic setting, but the end product of a territorial engineering operation that lasted generations.

There is also a small place-name paradox that always amuses those who hear it for the first time. The name of the facility itself echoes the formula with which fairy tales begin, and the territory it sits in hosts one of the most literal archaeological sites in Italy: a Roman port city emptied by the river and buried by sand, rediscovered starting in 1801 under Pius VII. Time, around here, truly has the character of a fairy tale: a port that served 50,000 inhabitants at the height of the second century AD is today a meadow with brick walls, and the countryside that surrounds it is younger than the railway that crosses it.

The artistic side: shows, courses and a space that becomes a stage

Alongside the educational activity, the facility declares an artistic vocation, with shows and courses hosted in the same spaces. It deserves a few more lines, because the combination of animals and theater is not a whim but a tradition with long roots. European theater for children has always used the farm as a natural set: animals are the first characters a child recognizes, the fables of Aesop and La Fontaine are populated with donkeys, goats, hens and foxes, and a real enclosure gives a story a credibility that no painted backdrop reaches.

From a practical point of view, a day that includes a performance part has a different rhythm from a purely agricultural day. There are moments when the children sit and moments when they move, and the sequence of the two has to be calibrated to age. With the youngest, seated attention doesn't last long, and it's best for the performance part to come early, when concentration is still intact. With primary school groups the reverse order works better: first the meeting with the animals, which burns off the excitement of arrival, then the quiet moment.

Which courses and which shows are actually scheduled in a given period changes, and there is no point fixing it here. The right question to ask when booking is simple: what is planned on the chosen date, how long does it last, where does it take place if it rains. That last one is the most important of all, because an outdoor facility with a performance component must have a backup plan, and knowing in advance what it is avoids finding yourself with 30 children under a gazebo watching the rain.

Why animals work on stage

There is a technical reason why this kind of experience holds up. A child who has just milked a goat listens to a story about goats in a completely different way from a child who has never touched one. The earlier physical experience works as an anchor for memory: what follows attaches to a real sensation, the warmth of the milk, the smell of straw, the sound of a hoof on packed earth. Teachers who regularly bring classes to the farm verify this in the following months, when the children recall that day with a level of sensory detail that museum trips rarely produce.

Something nobody tells you about C’era Una Volta Educational Farm

What nobody puts in writing is that the deciding variable of a day here is not the animals, and not even the program: it is the adults who accompany. In a facility with free-roaming animals the behavior of the group determines the behavior of the animals, and the behavior of the group is determined by the grown-ups. If the chaperones arrive in a rush, talk loudly and push the children toward the enclosures to take photographs, the animals move away and the day goes limp within 20 minutes. If the chaperones sit down, lower their voices and let the animals take the first step, exactly the opposite happens.

This has a consequence that applies to families even more than to schools. Classes arrive with teachers used to managing enthusiasm. Parents, by contrast, tend to interpret the day as an attraction to be consumed, and consuming an attraction has a rhythm incompatible with that of a donkey. The parent who gets bored after 10 minutes, pulls out the phone and starts asking the child whether they're finished in effect closes the experience before it begins. The minimum time for a child to stop behaving like a visitor and start behaving like a participant is around 40 minutes.

The second thing that doesn't get said concerns expectations about numbers. An educational farm is not a collection. Anyone who arrives counting species, as you do in a wildlife park, is always disappointed, because the animals present in a facility of this kind are those of the domestic tradition and their number varies over time with births, transfers and seasons. The value of the day is not measured in how many different species you saw, but in how much time you spent with a single one. A child who milked a goat and walked next to a donkey had a full day. A child who went through six enclosures in an hour had nothing.

The third concerns clothing, and it seems trivial until you see a group arrive in white sneakers. In an outdoor facility with animals you walk on earth, straw and dung. Shoes get dirty, pants get dirty, hands get dirty. A child who has been told not to get dirty touches nothing, and if they touch nothing the day loses its only content. Dressing the children so that they can get dirty is the premise of the whole experience, not a logistical detail.

My advice for visiting C’era Una Volta Educational Farm

The main advice is only one and concerns the phone, not in the sense of turning it off, but in the sense of using it beforehand. This facility works by appointment, and every piece of information about days, hours, costs, duration and type of activity must be asked through the official channels before getting in the car. It's not a formality: it is how all businesses of this kind work, where the number of operators is limited and where a day already taken by a school group can't take other groups. A three-minute phone call settles in advance everything you would otherwise discover in front of a closed gate.

The second piece of advice concerns the time of day. Activities with the animals work best in the morning, and not for organizational reasons but for animal reasons: domestic animals have rhythms tied to feeding and temperatures, and in the middle hours of a hot day they retreat into the shade and become much less available. Anyone arriving at 11 on a June day will find goats motionless in the shade and donkeys with no intention of walking. Anyone who arrives early finds active, curious animals.

The third piece of advice is to calibrate the duration to the real age of the group, not the declared one. With children under four, two full hours is the maximum workable, and it's best to plan a break halfway. With the primary school age band a whole morning is comfortably sustained. With older kids the risk is the opposite: they get bored if the experience is told in too childish a register, and they work much better if you give them a concrete task, leading an animal, cleaning an enclosure, taking care of the feed.

What to bring

Closed shoes already written off, for everyone, adults included. A full change of clothes for children under six, because contact with the ground and with water is guaranteed. A light windbreaker even in spring, because this coastal strip catches wind and the perceived temperature is almost always lower than the forecast. A hat and sunscreen from April on: here the shade is that of the trees, and in the open enclosures there is none. Water in larger quantity than seems reasonable. If anyone in the family is allergic to fur or to grasses, the usual antihistamine, because hay and straw raise dust.

A recommendation worth repeating: don't bring food for the animals. It's the most common error and the most harmful. The animals of an educational facility follow a set diet, and bread, cookies or fruit brought from home undo the work of the people who look after them, besides causing digestive problems, even serious ones. If a feeding activity is planned, the facility supplies the food. It's a simple rule that children understand perfectly if you explain it to them as a matter of respect and not as a prohibition.

How to prepare the children the day before

It's worth spending 10 minutes, the evening before, explaining three things. The first is that animals are not toys and are not to be chased: whoever runs after a hen never catches it and only frightens it. The second is that the hand should be held open and flat, never in a closed fist, when offering something. The third is that loud voices frighten, and that the way to get an animal to approach is to stand still and wait. Three rules, not 10: the children remember them and apply them, and the operator who welcomes the group notices right away.

The Litorale Romano Reserve all around

It's good to know the context you are in, because it is one of the most interesting and least understood of the Roman territory. The Litorale Romano State Nature Reserve was established by ministerial decree on March 29, 1996, after a first measure in 1987 and with a supplementary decree in December of that same year, 1996. It extends over more than 16,000 hectares between the municipalities of Rome and Fiumicino, and its management is entrusted to the two municipalities for their respective stretches, with some nature areas entrusted to LIPU and WWF Italia.

The reserve is a mosaic, not a single block. It includes coastal dunes, historic pine forests, wetlands, stretches of river mouth and vast farmland. Within its perimeter fall the Castel Fusano pine forest, the Palidoro dunes, the wetlands entrusted to environmental associations and the archaeological areas of the Tiber mouth. This variety explains why the landscape changes radically within a few kilometers: you go from the umbrella pine to the low scrub, from the cultivated field to the reed bed, without gradual transitions.

The Castel Fusano pine forest, which is the most visible element of the whole system, covers 916 hectares and is cut in two by Via Cristoforo Colombo. It is not a spontaneous forest: the Sacchetti family bought the land in 1620 and in 1713 planted about 7,000 umbrella pines, adding holm oaks in the strip closest to the sea. In 1755 the pine forest passed to Prince Agostino Chigi and in 1932 the Municipality of Rome bought it from Prince Francesco Chigi, opening it to the public on April 21, 1933. On July 4, 2000 a devastating fire hit between 300 and 350 hectares of old pine forest and Mediterranean scrub, destroying 280 of them completely, and since 2018 the surviving pines have been attacked by the pine tortoise scale. A floristic study counted 455 plant species in this area, belonging to 272 genera and 73 families.

Knowing this changes how you look at the landscape during the trip. The dark line of pines on the horizon is not untouched nature: it is an 18th-century plantation, survivor of fires and parasites, that continues to exist because someone maintains it. It is exactly the same point that holds for the farm, and it is a point children grasp very well if you put it to them as a question rather than as a notion: who planted these trees, and why.

Another well-known fact, yet rarely mentioned

The well-known fact is that Ostia Antica is a great Roman archaeological site. What almost nobody connects to the visit to the farm is the reason that site still exists and is so well preserved: because the countryside around it stayed unpopulated for centuries. Ostia was born as a river port at the mouth of the Tiber, according to tradition founded by King Ancus Marcius in the seventh century BC, although the pottery evidence indicates a settlement between 390 and 350 BC. It became a fortified camp in the fourth century BC and grew to house, in the second century AD, about 50,000 inhabitants, all tied in some way to the grain supply of the capital.

The construction of the artificial ports of Claudius, in AD 42, and of Trajan, between 106 and 113, gradually shifted commercial traffic farther north, and in the third century the economic functions passed to Porto. After the Saracen raid of 846 the surviving population moved to the settlement fortified by Pope Gregory IV, Gregoriopoli, which is the core of the present village. On that core Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, future Pope Julius II, had built from 1483 the castle that still dominates the village, to strengthen Rome's coastal defense and guarantee the city's food supply. The attribution of the work remains uncertain: the most likely name is that of Baccio Pontelli, but Giorgio Vasari attributed it to Giuliano da Sangallo and other scholars have proposed Francesco di Giorgio Martini. Before him Pope Martin V had already erected a circular tower between 1423 and 1424, later reinforced by Cardinal Guillaume d'Estouteville between 1461 and 1483.

The point that interests those visiting the farm comes now. After the damage of the siege of 1556 and after the flood of 1557 that diverted the course of the Tiber, the whole area became marshy and was abandoned. For almost four centuries this countryside was empty. Systematic excavations began only in 1801, under Pius VII, and continued throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The reason you walk today in an almost intact Roman city is that nobody built on top of it, and nobody built on top of it because malaria made the place uninhabitable.

This means that the agricultural landscape in which the farm sits and the archaeological site you visit a few minutes away are two faces of the same phenomenon. The land reclamation that created the cultivated fields is the same operation that made tourist visits to the excavations possible. To tell a day in this territory keeping the two things separate is a way of missing the best part of the story: it went from imperial port to marsh, from marsh to reclaimed countryside, and from reclaimed countryside to the seaside periphery of a metropolis, all within the span of a few documented generations.

The right photo to take at C’era Una Volta Educational Farm

The photograph almost everyone tries to take is the child hugging the animal, and it is almost always the worst. It turns out badly for technical reasons even before aesthetic ones: the child looks at the lens, the animal looks elsewhere, the pose is forced and the light usually comes from above, that is, in the most unfavorable way possible. The result is a photograph identical to millions of others, in which you can't tell where you were or what was going on.

The photograph that works is a different one, and it has to be waited for rather than built. It is the moment when the child doesn't notice the camera because they are focused on what they have in hand: the goat's udder during milking, the donkey's halter during the walk, the feed in an open palm. In that instant the face has an expression you can't get with any verbal request, a serious and slightly worried concentration that is exactly the emotional content of the day. Whoever wants that photograph has to get down to the child's eye level, which means kneeling or crouching, and has to stop talking.

Light and timing

The best light in this coastal strip comes in the early morning and in the last hour before sunset. At midday the sun is overhead and produces hard shadows under the eyes, under hat brims and under the animals' chins: the photograph loses all detail in the dark areas. Anyone who comes in spring or autumn finds raking light for a good part of the morning, which is the ideal condition for golden backlight through the dust and hay stirred up by the animals' movements. That suspended dust, backlit, is the element that turns an ordinary photograph into one you look at again.

The shots not to forget

The detail of hands, adult or child, on an animal's coat: it closes the story better than any portrait. The profile of the donkey backlit, with ears that become two black shapes recognizable at a glance. The line of hooves and shoes on the packed earth during a walk, which tells of the shared rhythm. And, on the way out, the wide shot that includes the enclosure in the foreground and the dark line of pines on the horizon: it is the photograph that places the day geographically and that in 10 years will let you remember where you were.

A common-sense rule, which holds in every facility with animals and which here is particularly sensible: the flash stays off. A sudden flash in the face of a goat or a donkey produces a flight reaction that can be dangerous for nearby children, and it's no use anyway, because outdoors the built-in flash has no useful range. Whoever needs more light should move, not raise the power.

Some important events that happened here in history

A private facility of family size has no official chronology, and it would be dishonest to invent one. The territory it sits in, however, has a very dense one, and it is the one that gives depth to the day. It's worth keeping some of its passages in mind, because they all took place within a few kilometers of the gate.

The mouth that moves

1557 is the date that drew the present landscape. An exceptional flood of the Tiber permanently diverted the course of the river, moving the water away from the castle of Julius II and turning the surrounding plain into marsh. The year before, in 1556, the fortified village had suffered the damage of a siege. The sum of the two events decreed the abandonment of the settlement and the start of four centuries of depopulation. Anyone who looks at the castle today and wonders why a coastal fortress stands in the middle of fields has the answer in front of them: the river, quite simply, left.

The archaeological rediscovery

In 1801, under the pontificate of Pius VII, the systematic excavations of the ancient port city began. It was not a short operation: it continued throughout the 19th century, resumed with great intensity in the 20th and is not yet finished, since a substantial part of the ancient town remains underground. The result is one of the most readable Roman urban complexes in the world, with residential buildings and productive structures that tell daily life better than the celebratory monuments of the capital.

The railway and the birth of the modern coast

On August 10, 1924 the Roma-Lido railway was inaugurated, which for the first time put the sea half an hour from the city. It is the date that opens the contemporary history of this whole sector: from then on the coast stopped being isolated countryside and became the beach of the Romans. The station that serves the village, initially called Ostia Scavi, took its present name in 1939. Between 1943 and 1944 Allied bombings completely destroyed several stations on the line, including this one, which was later rebuilt and reopened to service.

The pine forest opened to the public and the fire

On April 21, 1933 the Castel Fusano pine forest, bought the year before by the Municipality of Rome from Prince Francesco Chigi, was opened to the public: the great park of the coast was born. On July 4, 2000 a fire devastated between 300 and 350 hectares of it, destroying 280 entirely, and the pines were not replanted in significant numbers. It is the gravest environmental wound in the recent history of this territory, and whoever crosses certain parts of the pine forest today still sees its mark.

The establishment of the reserve

On March 29, 1996 the ministerial decree established the Litorale Romano State Nature Reserve, giving a framework of protection to more than 16,000 hectares between Rome and Fiumicino, after a first measure in 1987 that went without follow-up and before a supplementary decree in December 1996. It is the measure that today defines the regime of the lands on which this farm also sits, and that explains why in this area certain building transformations are forbidden and certain farming landscapes have survived the real estate pressure that hit the rest of the coast.

Who has passed through C’era Una Volta Educational Farm

The honest answer is that those who pass through here are mostly children, and that is exactly the merit of the place. Educational farms don't build their reputation on illustrious guests but on classes that come back the following year, on families who arrive because someone told them about it at school pickup, on groups who choose to celebrate a birthday among the goats instead of in a play hall. A list of famous names, for a business of this kind, doesn't exist as a public document, and anyone who offered one would be filling a void with imagination.

The actual audience has a recognizable makeup. There are the preschool and primary schools of Municipio X and of the southern quadrants of Rome, which arrive by bus and represent the core of the activity. There are the families of the coast, who come on Sundays with small children and often return several times in the same season. There are the environmental education groups that work in the territory of the reserve. And there are, increasingly in recent years, foreign families staying in Rome and looking for a day outside the monument circuit: for a child taken to three museums in a row, an afternoon with a donkey is the thing that saves the parents' vacation.

Who has passed through this territory

If you widen your gaze to the few kilometers around, instead, the list becomes impressive. Generations of archaeologists have worked here, from the papal ones of the 19th century to the great excavators of the 20th. Benito Mussolini passed through here, aboard the first Roma-Lido train on August 10, 1924. Italian and foreign directors have shot here, attracted by the double setting of Roman ruins and seaside pine forest, in an area that for decades worked as a natural set half an hour from Cinecittà. And here, in a much less famous but far more continuous way, passed the Romagna farm laborers of the land reclamation, who literally built this landscape and who left surnames and turns of phrase still recognizable in the families of the area.

When to go and when to avoid

Spring is the best season, no argument. From March to May the temperatures are mild, the ground is dry enough not to turn to mire but damp enough not to raise dust, the animals are active all day and the surrounding countryside is at its visually most generous. It is also the period when schools concentrate their educational outings, which means availability runs out early: anyone organizing a school trip for April or May would do well to move weeks ahead.

Autumn is the second good window, and for families it is probably the best of all, because the pressure of school groups drops. From late September to early November the light is low and warm, temperatures stay pleasant and the farm landscape enters the phase of field work. The only warning concerns rain: in this coastal sector autumn downpours are short but intense, and the reclaimed ground absorbs slowly. After a serious downpour it's best to postpone by a day.

Summer has to be managed, not avoided. Between late June and August the middle hours become prohibitive, for children as for animals, and anyone who promises a full day under the July sun on this shadeless plain has never tried to do it. Activities work in the early morning hours and in the late afternoon. Anyone coming in summer should bring much more water than they think they need and plan nothing between 12 and 16.

Winter is the most underrated season and the most difficult. The clear days of January and February, with the tramontana cleaning the air, offer extraordinary visibility and light, and the empty countryside has a charm that is lost in spring. The problem is the mud and the foggy mornings, frequent on this damp plain, which make both driving and staying outdoors complicated. With very small children, in December and January, the day risks shrinking to an hour of cold. Whoever tries it should do so on a sunny day, after a dry week, and with really heavy clothes.

Days of the week

On weekdays during the school year the facility works mostly with groups, and a family showing up without an agreement risks finding everything taken. The weekend is the time for families, and it is also when any open events are concentrated. What the exact setup is in the chosen period must be asked through the official channels: it is one of those pieces of information that change from season to season and that no outside source can guarantee as reliable.

What is around C’era Una Volta Educational Farm

The advantage of the location is that it lets you build a whole day without long transfers. A few minutes away is the village of Ostia Antica, the medieval core fortified by Pope Gregory IV and dominated by the castle of Julius II: it is small, you can walk it in half an hour, and for children it has the advantage of being a real castle with a moat and a keep, which is the thing that always works. Next to the village is the archaeological area of Ostia Antica, which however takes time and legs: with small children, a morning at the farm and an afternoon at the excavations are too much for the same day, and it's best to choose.

Toward the sea, in a few minutes you reach the Castel Fusano pine forest, which offers shade, space and flat trails, and a little farther the Castelporziano estate, the presidential estate that borders the pine forest. Going north, across the Tiber, you enter the territory of Fiumicino, where you find the WWF Macchiagrande Oasis and the Lido di Maccarese, both within the perimeter of the same reserve. Those who want to stay on the theme of managed nature can push on to the Castel di Guido Oasis, on the other side of the western quadrant.

For those building an itinerary for children over several days, the classic references remain in the city: the Bioparco di Roma (Rome Zoo) at Villa Borghese and Explora, Rome's children's museum, which however belong to a completely different register, that of the urban, structured experience. Those looking instead for other countryside experiences in Lazio will find a similar logic at La Selvotta Nature Park, at VoloAlto Nature Park and at the Il girotondo degli animali Educational Farm, in the Pontine Plain.

Where to eat

The area around the village offers a few places to eat, and the Lido di Ostia, a few kilometers away, many more. Anyone traveling with a group of children, however, will almost always choose the packed lunch, which has two advantages: it eliminates downtime and lets you stay in context. Can you eat it inside the facility, and under what conditions? That is a question to ask when booking, because the rules on this point vary from facility to facility and change over time.

Quick questions about C’era Una Volta Educational Farm

Do you need to book?

Yes. The facility works by appointment, with groups and families, and the access conditions must be agreed in advance through the official channels.

Where exactly is it?

In the territory of Rome, inside the perimeter of the Litorale Romano State Nature Reserve and a short distance from the village of Ostia Antica. It's best to have the precise road reference given to you by voice when booking, because in this strip of countryside satellite navigators go wrong regularly.

What activities are there?

The facility lists as its own the meeting with animals that live free in their own spaces, goat milking and the walk with the donkeys, along with an artistic program of shows and courses. The program of the individual day is agreed with whoever runs the place.

How much does it cost?

Fees are not given here because they vary with the type of group, the duration and the chosen activities. They must be asked of the facility directly.

Is it suitable for very small children?

Direct contact with docile animals works even with the smallest, but the duration must be reduced and the activity calibrated: under four years old, two hours is the reasonable limit. Any specific assessment should be made with whoever welcomes the group.

Can you go with dogs?

In a facility with free-roaming domestic animals the presence of dogs is almost always tightly regulated, for obvious safety reasons. It's a question to ask before leaving, never to settle on site.

What happens if it rains?

It depends on the covered spaces available and the type of activity planned. It's the first piece of information to ask for when booking in autumn or winter.

How do you contact the facility?

Through the Facebook page fattoriadidatticaceraunavolta or by phone and messaging at the number +39 373 700 0312.

In our judgment this business should be taken for what it is: a small, private place, run by people who live with animals, in a corner of the Roman countryside that has behind it a history much bigger than the landscape lets you guess. It offers no attractions, no numbers, no spectacle. It offers a child with dirty hands who has understood where milk comes from and who has walked for 20 minutes next to an animal that was in no hurry. Call ahead, go in the morning, wear shoes that can be ruined and give the little ones the time to stand in front of an enclosure doing nothing: that is where the important part usually happens.

Frequently asked questions about C'era Una Volta, Educational Farm

Where is C'era Una Volta, Educational Farm?

C'era Una Volta, Educational Farm, is in the southwestern sector of the municipal territory of Rome, inside Municipio X, in the area of the Litorale Romano Nature Reserve and near the village of Ostia Antica.

Do you need to book to visit the farm?

Yes, C'era Una Volta, Educational Farm, works by appointment, with groups and families. Any information on days, hours, costs and duration of the activities must be asked through the facility's official channels before getting in the car, because the number of operators available is limited.

Is it a public park or a private facility?

C'era Una Volta, Educational Farm, is a private facility, not a public asset, even though it is inside the perimeter of the Litorale Romano State Nature Reserve, established by ministerial decree on March 29, 1996.

What kind of experience does the farm offer children?

The main feature of the facility is the presence of free-roaming animals, docile and gentle, which let the visitor get familiar with them without physical barriers, unlike a zoo or a wildlife park where the animal stays behind a fence.

Are there also shows or courses, besides the animals?

Yes, alongside the educational activity with the animals the facility also declares an artistic vocation, with shows and courses hosted in the same spaces, following a long tradition that links farms to theater for children.

What is the best time to go to C'era Una Volta?

Spring, from March to May, is the best season to visit the farm: temperatures are mild, the ground is neither muddy nor dusty, and the animals are active all day. It is also the period of school outings, so availability runs out sooner.

What to see near C'era Una Volta, Educational Farm?

A few minutes from the farm is the village of Ostia Antica, the medieval core fortified by Pope Gregory IV with the castle of Julius II, which can be visited in half an hour and is appreciated by children for the moat and the keep.

Article written by the editorial team of TourLeaderPro, contact them for Private/Corporate/V.I.P. Tours and Experiences. For a day organized between Ostia Antica and the Roman coast, with a licensed tour guide and transport included, start from the TourLeaderPro contact page. Tour operators building itineraries for families in Lazio will find the consulting service in the section dedicated to tour operators.

Planning a trip to Italy? The English guides are on ItalyPlanner.com. For those thinking in day trips out of the city there is the guide to the best day trips from Rome, while those traveling with children will find practical tips in the guide to Rome with kids.