VacationSelector

Cannes or Rome?

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.

Rome
✓ Best match
72
match

Wins on good for families and museums & heritage 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 trip is built around the water. The sea sits 1km from the centre, 68 beaches lie within reach, and the driest, warmest weeks of the year line up with swimming season.

Choose Rome if you want museums, ruins and late evenings within walking distance of where you sleep, and far more to occupy children. Its appeal holds through spring and autumn, while Cannes is mainly a summer proposition.

Scoreboard

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

CannesRome
Beaches & swimming. Cannes leads by 40 points.40
CannesRome
Score7333
Swim season months45
Beaches 10 km683
Coast distance1 km24 km
Water distance1 km24 km
Places to eat. Rome leads by 10 points.10
CannesRome
Score5060
Restaurants within 2 km of centre4732,241
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1910
Museums & heritage. Rome leads by 48 points.48
CannesRome
Score3684
Museums within 10 km31161
Museums within 2 km of centre579
Share of museums within 2 km %1649
Unesco sites within 50 km27
Nightlife. Rome leads by 46 points.46
CannesRome
Score2874
Drinking venues within 4 km1882,022
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre164912
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8745
Nightclubs within 4 km1985
Nature & day trips. Rome leads by 37 points.37
CannesRome
Score3370
Protected land share 50 km %1719
Landscape blanket share 50 km %160
Land share of disc %5378
Park area within 2 km13 hectares172 hectares
Good for families. Rome leads by 61 points.61
CannesRome
Score2586
Tourist attractions within 2 km7126
Park area within 2 km13 hectares172 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km34
Sights concentration. Rome leads by 43 points.43
CannesRome
Score5699
Notable places within 2 km951,125
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Rome leads by 6 points.6
CannesRome
Score6268
Price level global73.764.9
Daily budget€160€155
Year-round weather. Cannes leads by 3 points.3
CannesRome
Score7471
Monthly daytime high13.3 °C to 27.9 °C12 °C to 31.4 °C
Monthly rainfall13 mm to 138 mm21 mm to 114 mm
Dry months33
0255075100

Where they differ

Cannes puts swimming at the door: the sea is 1km from the centre against 24km in Rome, and there are 68 beaches nearby against Rome's 3. Getting into the water is a decision made at breakfast rather than a day out.

Rome has many times as many museums, grouped tightly around the centre, and 7 UNESCO-listed places within day-trip reach against Cannes's 2. It also has many times as many attractions and much more park space near the centre for children, and many times as many bars and clubs, though about half sit away from the middle.

Where they are alike

Weather is where the two sit closest. Both are mild in winter and hot in summer, Cannes running 13-28°C across the year and Rome 12-31°C, and each has three months with 40mm of rain or less, so the dry stretch falls in the same part of summer.

Eating and cost are the other near-matches. Rome has many times as many restaurants near the centre, Cannes a wider range of kitchens, and the national price estimates behind the two are close.

Which traveller are you?

Swimmers and anyone planning days on the sand should take Cannes. The sea is 1km from the centre and 68 beaches sit nearby, against 3 for Rome, whose coast lies 24km out and needs organising.

Families are better served by Rome. There are many more tourist attractions and much more park space near the centre, plus 4 theme parks within reach against 3, so wet or tired days have somewhere to go.

Museum-goers and people who want the evening to run late should also choose Rome: many times as many museums, closely grouped, and many times as many bars and clubs, though roughly half lie outside the centre.

What the numbers don't tell you

The daily budget figure is a national estimate of restaurant and hotel prices, one per country, not a measurement of either city. A heavily visited coastal town and a capital can each sit well away from their own country's average, by more than the gap between the two figures, so it settles nothing about which trip costs more.

Cannes's beach advantage lands in exactly the warm, dry window its monthly ratings favour, which is when everyone else arrives. Rome's sea is warm for five months, but at 24km from the centre swimming is a planned outing rather than an afternoon.

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
Rome
12
13
16
18
24
28
31
31
27
22
17
13
Sea temperature, °C
Cannes
14
13
14
15
18
21
24
25
23
20
18
16
Rome
15
14
14
15
18
22
25
25
24
21
19
16
Rainfall, mm
Cannes
74
53
51
69
42
34
13
18
84
124
138
91
Rome
67
69
57
75
62
33
21
38
70
97
114
103
Daylight, hours per day
Cannes
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Rome
10
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
Rome
4
5
6
7
9
10
11
11
8
6
4
4

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Cannes: 1991-2020 normals, Nice (18 km from centre). Rome: 1991-2020 normals, Roma / Ciampino (15.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Cannes is at its strongest in July and August: highs of 28°C, sea at 25°C and the driest stretch of the year at 13-18mm. Autumn shuts that down quickly, with 138mm in November.

Rome works across a longer season, spring and early autumn in particular, with highs near 24°C in May and warm, walkable days in September. High summer reaches 31°C, which is hard going among monuments on foot, and both cities turn persistently wet from October onwards.

Getting there

Flying fromCannesRome
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 30 m
€78-111
NCE · 20 km
2 h 0 m
€91-122
FCO · 23 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 55 m
€76-223
NCE · 20 km
2 h 20 m
€76-143
1 stop
FCO · 23 km
BarcelonaBCN
1 h 15 m
€83-135
NCE · 20 km
1 h 40 m
€44-74
FCO · 23 km
MadridMAD
1 h 50 m
€137-165
NCE · 20 km
2 h 15 m
€98-119
FCO · 23 km
CataniaCTA
1 h 55 m
no fares
MRS · 146 km
1 h 20 m
€60-112
FCO · 23 km
AmsterdamAMS
1 h 50 m
€170-248
NCE · 20 km
2 h 10 m
€176-218
FCO · 23 km
PalermoPMO
1 h 40 m
no fares
MRS · 146 km
1 h 10 m
€38-50
FCO · 23 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
8 h 10 m
€666-799
1 stop
NCE · 20 km
8 h 45 m
€446-597
FCO · 23 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
6 h 20 m
€375-433
NCE · 20 km
5 h 45 m
€270-340
FCO · 23 km
SeoulICN, GMP
11 h 35 m
no fares
MRS · 146 km
11 h 15 m
€630-760
FCO · 23 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

MeasureCannesRome
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 m21 m
Main airportNice-Côte d'Azur Airport (NCE)20 km from centre129 non-stop destinationsRome–Fiumicino Leonardo da Vinci International Airport (FCO)23 km from centre230 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureCannesRome
City population74,3502,748,109
People per km²3,7932,135
Museums within 10 km16177
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km27
Distinct cuisines in the centre3865
Swim season, months above 21 °C4 months5 months

Where else could you go?

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