I'm back from a great first trip to Italy with my 12 year old daughter (and, for the first part, my father). I don't know where the best place to share this is, so I'm going to start here and check around the forums to see if there's another place to share it.
Two of the very cool things we did in Italy we did in Venice:
First, we took a gondola lesson from Row Venice. For 90 minutes, we were taught how to row a gondola--first standing in the middle of the boat with an oar out of the left hand side of the boat, and then we each got a turn at the MUCH harder back of the boat, where a lone gondolier stands at the back of the boat. We paddled through the quiet, less touristy parts of Venice out to the lagoon north of the city and paddled out there where there were fewer things to hit. :) It was incredible! The unexpected bonus: in addition to the female gondola "coach," we had a translator who invited us to ask him anything we wanted about gondolas or Venice. We did just that, peppering him with questions about gondola racing, why there are only male gondoliers, how Venetians are coping with all us tourists, growing up in Venice, etc. Highly recommend!
Second, we took a cooking class outside of Venice, in Padova. It was fun getting outside of the city and going inside an Italian house and being taught by an Italian woman with a true passion for cooking and sharing her food culture with us. We found the class through the New York Times--maybe it's been listed here in Rick Steves formums??--but it was touted as "one of the five best cooking classes in Italy." It lived up to that. We learned how to make gnocchi, an accompanying cheese sauce, and how to make gelato (which was fun because after having eaten so many scoops of it, now I knew how to make it). There's nothing like bringing food home with you to share the experience with others and to relive it. Again, highly recommend this, too!