This year, they all said the same thing, more or less. Be safe. Have a safe flight. Take care. Keep your eyes open. Don't go to the Vatican on the Sunday before Christmas.

A year ago, they were all along the lines of – have fun, eat well, go to this restaurant or that, spend our inheritance (slight exaggeration here but you get the sentiment).

For years and years, I dreamt of what it would be like to have holidays where we didn't do all the cooking and the cleaning, the shopping and sweeping.

Yes, I loved those holidays so much – children sprawled out napping under trees after hours in the water, home-made mojitos at the elbow of a spouse miraculous with a cocktail shaker, litres of mango smoothies for the kids. Adults taking turns for naps and beach watch. Dozens of bottles of two important liquids – mosquito repellent and sunscreen. Huge trolleys of food trundled up and down supermarket aisles.

But the fact is that holidays like those are, for parents, a change of scenery rather than a change of work.

Those holidays also cost a small fortune (and, don't you worry, I'm well aware of my good fortune in being able to have that money to spend). Two weeks at a Central Coast beach renting a house which would accommodate up to 12 people cost then – more or less – the same as two return flights to Europe.

Now those two weeks of beachside holidays cost even more; and my desire to travel further than 90 kilometres is untrammelled by my darling small children who then hated being in a car for longer than a CD of Stephen Fry reading a chapter of Harry Potter. (Mind you, they love travelling now. Hard to imagine that these adults of mine who used to sob uncontrollably after one hour in a car are now happy to spend 24 hours to get to the other side of the world.)

Our children have travelled more than their parents, we who married and babied early. They know it's just eight weeks working in a call centre to put together their plane fares, shared dormitory accommodation, street food and dodgy guts across the world.

But now we are travelling, they are more worried about their elderly parents caught in crossfire or murdered on purpose than we ever were about them (not entirely true, I worried about them but assumed that the worst would be some horrible – but curable – disease). Be vigilant, said a friend who'd just returned from Paris. As if vigilance would have saved a single person last month.

But it's true that even as I bought the tickets, boarded the plane, flew near sites of war, I was more worried than I'd ever been (and, believe me, I am a natural worrier, I'm so good at worrying that I turn my concerns over and over in my mind until they harden, like little polished stones). Maybe that was what prompted the flood of texts wishing me safe passage before fun.

Now here I am in Rome, sitting on a sunny terrace in Trastevere, about to visit Naples and inhaling the first novel all year, the much adored My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, when I read this: "In other words, the last 10 days of July gave me a sense of wellbeing that I had never known before. I felt a sensation that later in my life was often repeated: the joy of the new. I liked everything: getting up early, making breakfast, tidying up, walking in Barano, taking the road to the Maronti ... I did not feel homesick."

And this is how I am, most of the time. I am in churches and bars, in museums and concerts. On TripAdvisor looking at reviews by those who have reviewed many time. I have embraced being a tourist with such enthusiasm that it leaves me exhausted every night but confident that even if I never come to Italy again, I will have seen enough to be content.

Yet nervous. This year I'm nervous.

The streets are not exactly filled with soldiers or police – but every few blocks there are uniformed men with guns who tell me I must not take their photos nor take photos of their vehicles with slogans I translate as safe streets. The Romans seem untroubled by the presence of the military. But it frightens me.

As Ferrante wrote about her holiday, the first in her life, "I liked everything".

Me too. I liked everything but this.

Twitter @jennaprice or email jennapricejournalist@gmail.com