VacationSelector

Bologna or Sydney?

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 value for money and museums & heritage with your weighting.

Sydney
✓ Best match
64
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and nightlife 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.

BolognaSydney
Beaches & swimming. Sydney leads by 60 points.60
BolognaSydney
Score060
Swim season months06
Beaches 10 km2160
Coast distance74 km7 km
Water distance7 km
Places to eat. Sydney leads by 20 points.20
BolognaSydney
Score5878
Restaurants within 2 km of centre8222,205
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2031
Museums & heritage. Bologna leads by 16 points.16
BolognaSydney
Score6751
Museums within 10 km5844
Museums within 2 km of centre4320
Share of museums within 2 km %7445
Unesco sites within 50 km32
Nightlife. Sydney leads by 22 points.22
BolognaSydney
Score5375
Drinking venues within 4 km7202,050
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre5311,405
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7469
Nightclubs within 4 km30120
Nature & day trips. Sydney leads by 19 points.19
BolognaSydney
Score3958
Protected land share 50 km %710
Landscape blanket share 50 km %10
Land share of disc %10052
Park area within 2 km119 hectares115 hectares
Good for families. Sydney leads by 9 points.9
BolognaSydney
Score5564
Tourist attractions within 2 km3237
Park area within 2 km119 hectares115 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km02
Sights concentration. Bologna and Sydney are level on 60.
BolognaSydney
Score6060
Notable places within 2 km120123
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Bologna leads by 18 points.18
BolognaSydney
Score6850
Price level global64.990.2
Daily budget€155
Year-round weather. Sydney leads by 14 points.14
BolognaSydney
Score6781
Monthly daytime high7 °C to 31.5 °C17.7 °C to 27.7 °C
Monthly rainfall34 mm to 75 mm55 mm to 121 mm
Dry months50
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
Sydney
28
27
26
23
21
18
18
19
22
24
25
26
Sea temperature, °C
Bologna
No coastline within reach
Sydney
23
23
23
22
21
20
19
18
18
19
20
21
Rainfall, mm
Bologna
36
36
49
54
50
37
34
40
75
75
70
58
Sydney
80
116
90
95
89
121
70
63
57
55
71
68
Daylight, hours per day
Bologna
9
10
12
13
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sydney
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
Sydney
8
6
7
7
7
6
7
8
8
8
7
8

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). Sydney: 1991-2020 normals, Sydney Airport (3.7 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBolognaSydney
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 0 m
€114-267
BLQ · 6 km
20 h 40 m
€931-1073
1 stop
SYD · 9 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
2 h 25 m
€154-191
1 stop
BLQ · 6 km
18 h 15 m
no fares
SYD · 9 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 40 m
€158-262
1 stop
BLQ · 6 km
20 h 35 m
no fares
SYD · 9 km
RomeFCO, CIA
1 h 0 m
no fares
BLQ · 6 km
19 h 55 m
no fares
SYD · 9 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
8 h 30 m
€637-650
VCE · 138 km
19 h 30 m
no fares
SYD · 9 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
5 h 55 m
no fares
BLQ · 6 km
14 h 50 m
no fares
SYD · 9 km
DohaDOH
5 h 35 m
no fares
VCE · 138 km
15 h 15 m
€997-1100
SYD · 9 km
ShanghaiPVG, SHA
11 h 10 m
no fares
VCE · 138 km
9 h 55 m
€539-575
1 stop
SYD · 9 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

MeasureBolognaSydney
Official languageItalianEnglish
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Australian Dollar (AUD)
SocketsCFL230 V, 50 HzI230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+10, UTC+11 in summer
Emergency number112000
Elevation54 m6 m
Main airportBologna Guglielmo Marconi Airport (BLQ)6 km from centre97 non-stop destinationsSydney Kingsford Smith International Airport (SYD)9 km from centre94 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureBolognaSydney
City population387,9715,450,496
People per km²2,754449
Museums within 10 km6638
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km32
Distinct cuisines in the centre6279
Swim season, months above 21 °C6 months

Where else could you go?

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