VacationSelector

Cardiff or Rome?

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

Your match

Cardiff
48
match

Wins on beaches & swimming with your weighting.

Rome
✓ Best match
72
match

Wins on good for families and sights concentration 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.

CardiffRome
Beaches & swimming. Cardiff leads by 13 points.13
CardiffRome
Score4633
Swim season months05
Beaches 10 km83
Coast distance2 km24 km
Water distance2 km24 km
Places to eat. Cardiff and Rome are level on 60.
CardiffRome
Score6060
Restaurants within 2 km of centre5412,241
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3210
Museums & heritage. Rome leads by 45 points.45
CardiffRome
Score3984
Museums within 10 km61161
Museums within 2 km of centre679
Share of museums within 2 km %1049
Unesco sites within 50 km17
Nightlife. Rome leads by 26 points.26
CardiffRome
Score4874
Drinking venues within 4 km5362,022
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre395912
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7445
Nightclubs within 4 km3585
Nature & day trips. Rome leads by 20 points.20
CardiffRome
Score5070
Protected land share 50 km %1819
Landscape blanket share 50 km %150
Land share of disc %6878
Park area within 2 km88 hectares172 hectares
Good for families. Rome leads by 54 points.54
CardiffRome
Score3286
Tourist attractions within 2 km4126
Park area within 2 km88 hectares172 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km24
Sights concentration. Rome leads by 54 points.54
CardiffRome
Score4599
Notable places within 2 km511,125
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Rome leads by 14 points.14
CardiffRome
Score5468
Price level global84.964.9
Daily budget€155
Year-round weather. Rome leads by 17 points.17
CardiffRome
Score5471
Monthly daytime high7.7 °C to 20.2 °C12 °C to 31.4 °C
Monthly rainfall49 mm to 87 mm21 mm to 114 mm
Dry months03
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
Cardiff
8
8
10
13
16
18
20
20
18
14
11
9
Rome
12
13
16
18
24
28
31
31
27
22
17
13
Sea temperature, °C
Cardiff
8
7
8
9
12
15
17
18
17
15
12
9
Rome
15
14
14
15
18
22
25
25
24
21
19
16
Rainfall, mm
Cardiff
77
55
49
54
56
56
61
66
54
87
83
79
Rome
67
69
57
75
62
33
21
38
70
97
114
103
Daylight, hours per day
Cardiff
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Rome
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Cardiff
2
3
4
6
7
7
7
6
5
4
2
2
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. Cardiff: 1991-2020 normals, Cardiff-Wales Airport (14.9 km from centre). Rome: 1991-2020 normals, Roma / Ciampino (15.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCardiffRome
MadridMAD
2 h 5 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
2 h 15 m
€98-119
FCO · 23 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 10 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
2 h 0 m
€91-122
FCO · 23 km
BarcelonaBCN
2 h 5 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
1 h 40 m
€44-74
FCO · 23 km
CataniaCTA
3 h 5 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
1 h 20 m
€60-112
FCO · 23 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
1 h 55 m
€85-113
1 stop
BRS · 34 km
1 h 15 m
€84-118
FCO · 23 km
PalermoPMO
2 h 55 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
1 h 10 m
€38-50
FCO · 23 km
TurinTRN
1 h 55 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
1 h 15 m
no fares
FCO · 23 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
7 h 10 m
no fares
CWL · 15 km
9 h 0 m
€487-550
1 stop
FCO · 23 km
MarrakechRAK
3 h 20 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
3 h 10 m
no fares
CIA · 14 km
New DelhiDEL
8 h 40 m
no fares
BHX · 146 km
7 h 40 m
no fares
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 2026-09 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

MeasureCardiffRome
Official languageEnglishItalian
CurrencyPound Sterling (GBP)Euro (EUR)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzCFL230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112 or 999112
Elevation41 m21 m
Main airportCardiff International Airport (CWL)15 km from centre8 non-stop destinationsRome–Fiumicino Leonardo da Vinci International Airport (FCO)23 km from centre230 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year8 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureCardiffRome
City population383,5362,748,109
People per km²2,7342,135
Museums within 10 km9177
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km17
Distinct cuisines in the centre5565
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone5 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Cardiff 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). Public holidays from Nager.Date (MIT). Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates. 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. Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. 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.