VacationSelector

Bologna or Cape Town?

Two destinations compared on nine measures of openly sourced data. Weight what matters to you and the verdict follows.

Your match

Bologna
52
match

Wins on good for families and sights concentration with your weighting.

Cape Town
✓ Best match
57
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and year-round weather with your weighting.

What matters to you?

Pick a travel style or drag the sliders. The match scores above update as you do.

Scoreboard

Each measure scored 0 to 100. Open a row for the figures behind the score.

BolognaCape Town
Beaches & swimming. Cape Town leads by 60 points.60
BolognaCape Town
Score060
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km229
Coast distance74 km1 km
Water distance—1 km
Places to eat. Cape Town leads by 9 points.9
BolognaCape Town
Score5867
Restaurants within 2 km of centre822650
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2042
Museums & heritage. Bologna leads by 13 points.13
BolognaCape Town
Score6754
Museums within 10 km5825
Museums within 2 km of centre4320
Share of museums within 2 km %7480
Unesco sites within 50 km33
Nightlife. Bologna leads by 6 points.6
BolognaCape Town
Score5347
Drinking venues within 4 km720483
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre531389
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7481
Nightclubs within 4 km3047
Nature & day trips. Bologna leads by 3 points.3
BolognaCape Town
Score3936
Protected land share 50 km %76
Landscape blanket share 50 km %10
Land share of disc %10042
Park area within 2 km119 hectares27 hectares
Good for families. Bologna leads by 19 points.19
BolognaCape Town
Score5536
Tourist attractions within 2 km3219
Park area within 2 km119 hectares27 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km00
Sights concentration. Bologna leads by 15 points.15
BolognaCape Town
Score6045
Notable places within 2 km12051
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cape Town leads by 17 points.17
BolognaCape Town
Score6885
Price level global64.940.5
Daily budget€155—
Year-round weather. Cape Town leads by 19 points.19
BolognaCape Town
Score6786
Monthly daytime high7 °C to 31.5 °C18 °C to 27.5 °C
Monthly rainfall34 mm to 75 mm10 mm to 97 mm
Dry months56
0255075100

When should you go?

The figures behind each month. Each row is shaded against that destination's own year, so the deepest cell is its best month for that measure and the palest its weakest. Shades are not comparable between the two rows.

J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D
Daytime high, °C
Bologna
7
10
15
19
24
29
32
32
26
19
13
8
Cape Town
27
28
26
24
21
18
18
18
20
22
24
26
Sea temperature, °C
Bologna
No coastline within reach
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
Rainfall, mm
Bologna
36
36
49
54
50
37
34
40
75
75
70
58
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
Daylight, hours per day
Bologna
9
10
12
13
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Sunshine, hours per day
Bologna
3
4
6
7
8
10
11
10
7
5
3
3
Cape Town
12
10
9
8
6
6
6
7
8
9
10
11

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Bologna: 1991-2020 normals, Bologna / Borgo Panigale (5.5 km from centre). Cape Town: 1991-2020 normals, Cape Town Airport (17.5 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBolognaCape Town
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 0 m
€114-267
BLQ · 6 km
12 h 5 m
€634-815
CPT · 18 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
2 h 25 m
€154-191
1 stop
BLQ · 6 km
10 h 35 m
€717-799
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 40 m
€158-262
1 stop
BLQ · 6 km
11 h 40 m
€742-801
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
1 h 25 m
no fares
BLQ · 6 km
11 h 45 m
€632-724
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
AmsterdamAMS
1 h 50 m
no fares
BLQ · 6 km
12 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
MunichMUC
1 h 10 m
no fares
BLQ · 6 km
11 h 30 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
8 h 30 m
€637-650
VCE · 138 km
15 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
5 h 55 m
no fares
BLQ · 6 km
9 h 40 m
€611-615
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
ZurichZRH
1 h 5 m
no fares
BLQ · 6 km
11 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
9 h 55 m
no fares
VCE · 138 km
16 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km

The busiest departure cities for these two, with a place kept for each other part of the world. Busiest means arriving passengers where an official count exists, and where none does, the number of non-stop services flown: official route statistics are published by the European reporting countries and by nobody else, so a table ranked on them alone would offer a reader in New York or Tokyo ten European cities. Flying times are estimated from the distance between airports, and every row is a city flown non-stop to both. Where the typical offer connects anyway, the stops are shown. Under each figure is the airport the flight lands at and how far that is from the centre, because the nearest airport is not always the one a route is flown to. Where both columns name the same airport it is one flight, and the difference between the two is the distance printed beside it. Typical return fares for 2026-08 to 2026-09, cached market data up to 7 days old. The figure is the middle half of the offers found, so a single price means they agreed and a range means they did not; for a typical route that middle half spans about a quarter of the median, and for the least settled routes rather more than the median itself.

Before you go

MeasureBolognaCape Town
Official languageItalianEnglish, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Venda, Northern Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Sesotho, Southern Ndebele, South African Sign Language
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Rand (ZAR)
SocketsCFL230 V, 50 HzCMN230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+2
Emergency number112112
Elevation54 m5 m
Main airportBologna Guglielmo Marconi Airport (BLQ)6 km from centre97 non-stop destinationsCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days12 days

By the numbers

MeasureBolognaCape Town
City population387,9713,776,313
People per km²2,7541,538
Museums within 10 km6622
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km33
Distinct cuisines in the centre6265
Swim season, months above 21 °C–None

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Bologna or Cape Town somewhere new.

Browse every destination we have measured

Sources

© OpenStreetMap contributors, data available under the Open Database Licence. Place counts include data from Overture Maps Foundation (CDLA Permissive 2.0), assembled from Meta, Microsoft, Foursquare and other providers. Notable-place counts from Wikidata (CC0), weighted by Wikipedia language editions. Structured data from Wikidata (CC0). Weather data by Meteostat. Meteorological data provided by NOAA, DWD and others. Airport data from OurAirports (public domain). Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. Public holidays from Nager.Date (MIT). Non-stop route lists from the "Airlines and destinations" tables on English Wikipedia airport articles, by Wikipedia contributors, reused under CC BY-SA 4.0. Currency from the ISO 4217 register maintained by SIX, cross-checked against country data from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0). Price level from World Bank open data (PPP conversion factor for private consumption and official exchange rate), CC BY 4.0. Time zones from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0); clock offsets computed from the IANA time zone database. Sea surface temperature from NOAA OISST v2.1, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates. Daylight hours computed from each destination's latitude using the NOAA solar position algorithm. Typical fares from Travelpayouts (Aviasales data). Route-level air passenger statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0.

Scores follow rubric v2; snapshot generated 2026-08-31. Typical prices can be up to 7 days old. Daily budgets are estimates from country price levels.