MY son and I spent half term in a picturesque little lakeside village about 40 minutes from Rome.

It’s a beautiful place in a beautiful country, with wonderful little cobbled streets and cosy cafés full of locals drinking espresso.

It’s somewhere you can relax, enjoy the peace and quiet – and the incomparable ice cream – and forget about the rest of the world.

We spent a lot of time watching Shaun the Sheep. Not because we’re philistines but because we were visiting my sister and her husband, and they’ve just had their second child – 18 months after the first.

So we were sharing space with a three-week-old baby, a lively toddler and two adults who can only hope that one day, in some as yet unimaginable future, they may be able to sleep for more than two hours at a time.

My eldest nephew – an adorable, red-headed whirlwind of a child who takes over every room the moment he enters it – is calmed immediately for at least 10 minutes by the presence of Shaun, or ‘Baa’ as he calls it, on a screen.

And my sister needed to feed the baby without the well-intentioned but overly enthusiastic participation of his brother.

So we watched Baa. We also built towers out of bricks, pretended to be dinosaurs, picked up squished bits of fruit off the floor and wiped copious amounts of chocolate and dribble off our clothing.

We did get out to see the sights on some days. On one particularly memorable occasion we visited a nearby castle.

The baby, who until this point had happily fallen asleep the moment he was put into his carrier, proclaimed his dislike for the venue by screaming like a wounded velociraptor from the moment we set foot in the place.

The toddler, however, loved it. And demonstrated his love by running at full tilt towards every priceless, roped off relic he saw.

My sister was trying to calm the baby, my brother-in-law was trying to stop his eldest destroying anything irreplaceable, and both of them were hanging back to avoid disrupting anyone else. Meanwhile, my son and I were on a guided tour given in Italian minus the only family members who understand the language.

My brother-in-law eventually caught up, eldest baby wriggling in his arms, and apologised to the other people on the tour for the disturbance. They laughed and told him they’d have been upset had he been making the noise, but no need to apologise for the bambinos.

And when we were finally disgorged onto the street by the stressed-looking tour guide, who shut the door behind us with obvious relief, my brother-in-law looked at his babies, grinned and said “you’ll probably think I’m mad, but I really enjoyed that”.

He’s not mad. He enjoyed it for the same reason we were happy to watch Shaun the Sheep.

You can sightsee and be cultural whenever you want; the Coliseum isn’t going anywhere.

But babies are only babies for a very short time.