VacationSelector

Bologna or San Jose?

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

Your match

Bologna
✓ Best match
52
match

Wins on sights concentration and museums & heritage with your weighting.

San Jose
39
match

Wins on nature & day trips 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.

BolognaSan Jose
Beaches & swimming. San Jose leads by 8 points.8
BolognaSan Jose
Score08
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km21
Coast distance74 km14 km
Water distance14 km
Places to eat. Bologna leads by 17 points.17
BolognaSan Jose
Score5841
Restaurants within 2 km of centre822313
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2016
Museums & heritage. Bologna leads by 41 points.41
BolognaSan Jose
Score6726
Museums within 10 km5820
Museums within 2 km of centre439
Share of museums within 2 km %7445
Unesco sites within 50 km30
Nightlife. Bologna leads by 22 points.22
BolognaSan Jose
Score5331
Drinking venues within 4 km720231
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre53188
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7438
Nightclubs within 4 km3016
Nature & day trips. San Jose leads by 31 points.31
BolognaSan Jose
Score3970
Protected land share 50 km %726
Landscape blanket share 50 km %12
Land share of disc %10091
Park area within 2 km119 hectares101 hectares
Good for families. Bologna leads by 22 points.22
BolognaSan Jose
Score5533
Tourist attractions within 2 km322
Park area within 2 km119 hectares101 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km02
Sights concentration. Bologna leads by 46 points.46
BolognaSan Jose
Score6014
Notable places within 2 km1209
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Bologna leads by 25 points.25
BolognaSan Jose
Score6843
Price level global64.9100
Daily budget€155
Year-round weather. San Jose leads by 18 points.18
BolognaSan Jose
Score6785
Monthly daytime high7 °C to 31.5 °C15.4 °C to 26.8 °C
Monthly rainfall34 mm to 75 mm0 mm to 78 mm
Dry months58
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
San Jose
15
17
19
21
23
26
27
27
27
24
19
17
Sea temperature, °C
Bologna
No coastline within reach
San Jose
12
12
12
12
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
13
Rainfall, mm
Bologna
36
36
49
54
50
37
34
40
75
75
70
58
San Jose
50
78
51
25
9
2
0
0
2
15
33
62
Daylight, hours per day
Bologna
9
10
12
13
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
San Jose
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Bologna
3
4
6
7
8
10
11
10
7
5
3
3
San Jose
No sunshine record

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). San Jose: 1991-2020 normals, San Jose / Santa Clara Trailer Village (8.2 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBolognaSan Jose
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 0 m
€114-267
BLQ · 6 km
10 h 50 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 40 m
€158-262
1 stop
BLQ · 6 km
11 h 15 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
8 h 30 m
€637-650
VCE · 138 km
5 h 35 m
€286-328
1 stop
SFO · 57 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
1 h 25 m
no fares
BLQ · 6 km
11 h 25 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
BarcelonaBCN
1 h 40 m
€42-75
BLQ · 6 km
11 h 55 m
€653-1326
1 stop
SFO · 57 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
2 h 25 m
€154-191
1 stop
BLQ · 6 km
13 h 20 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
DallasDFW, DAL, AFW
11 h 0 m
no fares
VCE · 138 km
3 h 25 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
8 h 45 m
no fares
VCE · 138 km
4 h 55 m
€339-541
1 stop
SFO · 57 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
5 h 55 m
no fares
BLQ · 6 km
16 h 0 m
€1,005-1027
1 stop
SFO · 57 km
CancunCUN
11 h 10 m
no fares
VRN · 106 km
5 h 15 m
no fares
SFO · 57 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

MeasureBolognaSan Jose
Official languageItalian
CurrencyEuro (EUR)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsCFL230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC-8, UTC-7 in summer
Emergency number112911
Elevation54 m25 m
Main airportBologna Guglielmo Marconi Airport (BLQ)6 km from centre97 non-stop destinationsMineta San Jose International Airport (SJC)8 km from centre17 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureBolognaSan Jose
City population387,9711,013,240
People per km²2,7542,167
Museums within 10 km6619
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km30
Distinct cuisines in the centre6230
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Bologna or San Jose 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.