Catania or Verona?

Catania has the sea right in town, and two quite different kinds of shore. La Playa offers long, easy sand with beach clubs. North of the centre, around Aci Trezza, you swim off ladders into clear water among basalt sea stacks.

Verona has no coast of its own. Swimming means a half-hour trip to Lake Garda's lidos, lawns and Sirmione's limestone shelves. The calm, tideless water is pleasant, but it is a day out rather than something you do every day, and the season is shorter.

Catania eats on the street and at the market. Ragù-filled arancini, crispelle, horse meat grilled over smoke and granita with brioche make it the more exciting city to graze through. La Pescheria supplies the trattorias around it with fish caught that morning.

Verona's cooking is slower and heavier inland food: Amarone risotto, bigoli and bollito with pearà, served in wood-panelled osterie. Its strength is wine, with Valpolicella and Soave made within a short drive. Etna's volcanic wines give Catania a serious answer even there.

Verona has more history packed inside its loop of the Adige: the Arena, a Roman theatre, Piazza dei Signori and the Scaliger tombs, San Zeno's bronze doors, and Castelvecchio's museum in Scarpa's celebrated setting. Each era leaves a clear mark, and the museum is stronger.

Catania is mostly one striking moment, the dark-and-pale baroque city rebuilt after 1693. Via dei Crociferi and the vast San Nicolò monastery are its high points, with Roman fragments surfacing here and there. The museums are modest, but the Feast of Sant'Agata in February is a spectacle Verona cannot match.

Catania stays out far later. Its large student population packs the lanes around Piazza Bellini and Via Gemmellaro with outdoor drinkers well past midnight. In summer the beach clubs on La Playa become open-air dance floors.

Verona's evenings revolve around the aperitivo: a spritz or a glass of Valpolicella in Piazza delle Erbe, with cheaper student bars across the river in Veronetta. Most nights the streets empty early. The exception is in summer, when the opera crowd leaving the Arena livens up the centre for a while.

With Etna less than an hour away, Catania offers the more dramatic outdoors: a smoking 3,300m volcano with craters and lava flows to walk across, and even skiing in winter. The Alcantara Gorge lies beyond it, and the Riviera dei Ciclopi is good for snorkelling and diving.

Verona's landscapes are gentler and greener. There are vineyard walks and cycling in Valpolicella, beech woods on the Lessinia plateau, and Monte Baldo above Lake Garda, where the northern end draws windsurfers and sailors. Both cities' summer heat makes low-level walking hard work.

Catania opens up eastern Sicily. Siracusa's island old town of Ortigia and Taormina's theatre above the sea are each about an hour away, and Acireale and the Etna wine villages are closer still. The baroque towns of Noto, Modica and Ragusa Ibla, the Roman mosaics at Piazza Armerina and Caltagirone's ceramic staircase make a superb list. Most of them are an hour and a half or more away, though, and buses only cover the main towns, so the baroque circuit really needs a car.

Verona gives you more variety for less effort. Vicenza is under half an hour by train, Padua about forty-five minutes and Mantua under an hour, and Venice is only a little over an hour away. Sirmione and the other Garda towns, plus the Soave and Valpolicella cellars, are even closer. You can see Palladio, Giotto and the Grand Canal on the same trip and never drive at all.

Verona is the easier city with children. Its centre is flat, largely pedestrian and fine with a pushchair, and Gardaland, the safari park at Parco Natura Viva and Garda's shallow water are all about half an hour away.

Catania has gently shelving sand at La Playa, Etnaland and a volcano that older children love. The city itself is harder going, with heavy traffic, narrow uneven pavements, little shade and few attractions aimed at children.

Verona's main sights lie within a small, flat centre that is largely closed to traffic, so you hardly need transport at all. When you do, frequent trains run to Venice, Milan and the lake.

Catania's old centre is walkable too, but step outside it and things get harder. There is one metro line, buses are slow in the traffic and drivers do not always stop for pedestrians. Many visitors end up hiring a car for Etna and the baroque towns, and then struggle to park.

Neither city is a shopping destination, but Verona is the smarter place to browse. Marble-paved Via Mazzini and the boutiques and jewellers on Corso Porta Borsari give it a polished feel.

Catania's Via Etnea is mostly chain stores. The real fun is the noise of La Fiera and La Pescheria, and the best things to take home are Bronte pistachio cream, Caltagirone ceramics and Etna wine, where Verona's would be Amarone and pandoro.

Catania goes further on a modest budget. Street food counts as a full meal, trattorias by the market are fairly priced and rooms in the old centre are reasonable for most of the year. Summer rooms, sunbeds, guided trips to the craters and a hire car are the costs that add up.

In Verona, rooms are the main expense. Hotels in the historic centre are expensive for a city its size, and on opera nights and during trade fairs they are scarce and dear. On the other hand, you hardly spend anything getting around, and wine counters and Veronetta's osterie keep everyday eating fair.

Verona has the headline event: grand Verdi and Puccini productions in the Roman Arena on most summer evenings, plus Shakespeare, dance and jazz in the Roman theatre. The Teatro Filarmonico carries on through the cooler months.

Catania, Bellini's birthplace, has a fine opera house in the Teatro Massimo Bellini, with a season visitors can actually attend. Its own speciality is the opera dei pupi, the marionette theatre of knights and Saracens. Beyond that, there is not enough to fill many evenings.

Verona is the more restful choice. Sirmione's lakeside thermal pools, the warm spring-fed lake near Lazise and the Roman-era springs at Caldiero are all close, and the Giardino Giusti and the riverside offer calm within the city.

Catania's centre is noisy and full of traffic, and it has no bathing tradition. Spas are found in hotels on the coast or on Etna's lower slopes. The rest it does offer comes from the pace of the day, with a slow granita and a long lunch, or from a quieter village up on the volcano.