VacationSelector

Cannes or Florence?

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

Your match

Cannes
49
match

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

Florence
✓ Best match
55
match

Wins on museums & heritage 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.

The verdict

Choose Cannes if the sea is the point. It has 68 beaches nearby and four months when the water is warm enough for swimming, and it stays drier in midsummer.

Choose Florence if museums and heritage come first, with far more places to drink in the evening and a centre where the notable sights sit within walking distance of each other. It has no coast and no beach season at all.

Scoreboard

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

CannesFlorence
Beaches & swimming. Cannes leads by 73 points.73
CannesFlorence
Score730
Swim season months40
Beaches 10 km680
Coast distance1 km78 km
Water distance1 km—
Places to eat. Florence leads by 9 points.9
CannesFlorence
Score5059
Restaurants within 2 km of centre4731,299
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1915
Museums & heritage. Florence leads by 46 points.46
CannesFlorence
Score3682
Museums within 10 km31132
Museums within 2 km of centre593
Share of museums within 2 km %1670
Unesco sites within 50 km24
Nightlife. Florence leads by 28 points.28
CannesFlorence
Score2856
Drinking venues within 4 km188818
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre164599
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8773
Nightclubs within 4 km1934
Nature & day trips. Florence leads by 5 points.5
CannesFlorence
Score3338
Protected land share 50 km %179
Landscape blanket share 50 km %162
Land share of disc %53100
Park area within 2 km13 hectares86 hectares
Good for families. Florence leads by 27 points.27
CannesFlorence
Score2552
Tourist attractions within 2 km730
Park area within 2 km13 hectares86 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km30
Sights concentration. Florence leads by 19 points.19
CannesFlorence
Score5675
Notable places within 2 km95292
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Florence leads by 6 points.6
CannesFlorence
Score6268
Price level global73.764.9
Daily budget€160€155
Year-round weather. Cannes leads by 6 points.6
CannesFlorence
Score7468
Monthly daytime high13.3 °C to 27.9 °C10.8 °C to 32.7 °C
Monthly rainfall13 mm to 138 mm32 mm to 132 mm
Dry months32
0255075100

Where they differ

Cannes has the coast to itself: 68 beaches nearby against none in Florence, and four months when the sea sits at 21°C or more, peaking at 25°C in August.

Florence carries the heritage: many times as many museums as Cannes, sitting tightly around the centre, and 4 UNESCO-listed places within day-trip reach against 2 from Cannes. Evenings are wider too, with many times as many places to drink and about twice as many nightclubs, most of them near the centre.

Where they are alike

Neither is a base for wild country. Around Cannes 17% of the land is protected against 9% around Florence, while Florence has far more park space near its centre. Day trips are a supporting act in both.

Both sit in countries with similar national daily budgets, near €160 and €155, and both give a long usable season, from winter highs of 11-13°C to hot high summer.

Which traveller are you?

A swimmer or beach-first traveller: Cannes, with 68 beaches nearby and sea at 21°C or more for four months of the year. Florence offers nothing comparable, and its parks are not a substitute.

A museum-minded city walker: Florence, with many times as many museums as Cannes, about three times as many notable places within walking distance of the centre, and busier evenings once the galleries close.

Families split. Florence suits those who want attractions and park space close to the centre and manageable on foot; Cannes suits a trip built around swimming and the 3 theme parks within reach.

What the numbers don't tell you

The daily budget is a national estimate for each country, the general price level for restaurants and hotels, not a measurement of Cannes or Florence. A heavily visited city can sit well above its own national average, by more than the €160 and €155 figures differ, so treat them as background rather than as a comparison of the two trips.

The beach advantage is seasonal: the water is swimmable for four months, and those are also the months everyone else comes. In Florence, the warmest weeks reach 33°C, which is hard work in a city whose appeal is walking between sights.

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
Cannes
13
14
15
17
21
25
28
28
25
21
17
14
Florence
11
12
16
20
24
29
32
33
27
22
16
11
Sea temperature, °C
Cannes
14
13
14
15
18
21
24
25
23
20
18
16
Florence
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Cannes
74
53
51
69
42
34
13
18
84
124
138
91
Florence
68
58
59
65
63
41
32
35
102
125
132
95
Daylight, hours per day
Cannes
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Florence
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Cannes
5
6
7
7
9
10
11
11
8
6
5
5
Florence
4
4
6
6
8
9
11
10
7
5
4
3

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Cannes: 1991-2020 normals, Nice (18 km from centre). Florence: 1995-2020 (sunshine 1991-2020, rainfall 1991-2020) normals, Firenze / Peretola (5.6 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Cannes peaks in July and August: highs of 28°C, sea at 24-25°C and the driest stretch of the year, 13-18mm, so beach days are reliable.

Florence is better in late spring, with highs of 24-29°C in May and June and 41-63mm of rain, warm enough for long walking days without the 33°C of high summer. Both are at their wettest in October and November, when Cannes loses its swimming season and neither is comfortable for long days outdoors.

Getting there

Flying fromCannesFlorence
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 30 m
€78-111
NCE · 20 km
1 h 40 m
€143-159
FLR · 6 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 55 m
€76-223
NCE · 20 km
2 h 5 m
€180-199
1 stop
FLR · 6 km
AmsterdamAMS
1 h 50 m
€170-248
NCE · 20 km
1 h 55 m
€232-255
2 stops
FLR · 6 km
RomeFCO, CIA
1 h 10 m
€69-133
NCE · 20 km
55 m
€136-139
1 stop
FLR · 6 km
TiranaTIA
1 h 55 m
no fares
NCE · 20 km
1 h 35 m
no fares
PSA · 70 km
BarcelonaBCN
1 h 15 m
€83-135
NCE · 20 km
1 h 35 m
€113-168
FLR · 6 km
MunichMUC
1 h 25 m
€198-243
1 stop
NCE · 20 km
1 h 15 m
no fares
FLR · 6 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
1 h 30 m
€164-246
1 stop
NCE · 20 km
1 h 30 m
no fares
FLR · 6 km
MadridMAD
1 h 50 m
€137-165
NCE · 20 km
2 h 10 m
no fares
FLR · 6 km
MarrakechRAK
2 h 55 m
no fares
NCE · 20 km
3 h 10 m
no fares
PSA · 70 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 2026-10, 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

MeasureCannesFlorence
Official languageFrenchItalian
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCE230 V, 50 HzCFL230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation0 m50 m
Main airportNice-Côte d'Azur Airport (NCE)20 km from centre129 non-stop destinationsFlorence Airport, Peretola (FLR)6 km from centre36 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureCannesFlorence
City population74,350360,930
People per km²3,7933,528
Museums within 10 km16140
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km24
Distinct cuisines in the centre3862
Swim season, months above 21 °C4 months–

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Cannes or Florence 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. Sea surface temperature from NOAA OISST v2.1, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. 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. 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. Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates.

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.