VacationSelector

Chicago or Florence?

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

Your match

Too close to call, 1 point apart

Chicago
56
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and places to eat with your weighting.

Florence
55
match

Wins on museums & heritage and value for money 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.

ChicagoFlorence
Beaches & swimming. Chicago leads by 53 points.53
ChicagoFlorence
Score530
Swim season months10
Beaches 10 km120
Coast distance10,000 km78 km
Water distance1 km
Places to eat. Chicago leads by 22 points.22
ChicagoFlorence
Score8159
Restaurants within 2 km of centre2,1471,299
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3715
Museums & heritage. Florence leads by 36 points.36
ChicagoFlorence
Score4682
Museums within 10 km45132
Museums within 2 km of centre2093
Share of museums within 2 km %4470
Unesco sites within 50 km14
Nightlife. Chicago leads by 6 points.6
ChicagoFlorence
Score6256
Drinking venues within 4 km1,123818
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre728599
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6573
Nightclubs within 4 km5134
Nature & day trips. Chicago and Florence are level on 38.
ChicagoFlorence
Score3838
Protected land share 50 km %69
Landscape blanket share 50 km %02
Land share of disc %100100
Park area within 2 km118 hectares86 hectares
Good for families. Chicago leads by 3 points.3
ChicagoFlorence
Score5552
Tourist attractions within 2 km1830
Park area within 2 km118 hectares86 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km20
Sights concentration. Florence leads by 5 points.5
ChicagoFlorence
Score7075
Notable places within 2 km217292
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Florence leads by 25 points.25
ChicagoFlorence
Score4368
Price level global10064.9
Daily budget€155
Year-round weather. Florence leads by 11 points.11
ChicagoFlorence
Score5768
Monthly daytime high0.2 °C to 29.4 °C10.8 °C to 32.7 °C
Monthly rainfall54 mm to 121 mm32 mm to 132 mm
Dry months02
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
Chicago
0
3
9
15
22
27
29
28
25
17
10
3
Florence
11
12
16
20
24
29
32
33
27
22
16
11
Sea temperature, °C
Chicago
3
2
2
4
7
14
21
23
20
15
9
6
Florence
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Chicago
58
54
68
105
121
115
102
104
85
98
69
59
Florence
68
58
59
65
63
41
32
35
102
125
132
95
Daylight, hours per day
Chicago
10
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
Chicago
No sunshine record
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. Chicago: 1991-2020 normals, Chicago Midway Airport (14.5 km from centre). Florence: 1995-2020 (sunshine 1991-2020, rainfall 1991-2020) normals, Firenze / Peretola (5.6 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromChicagoFlorence
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
8 h 30 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
1 h 40 m
€143-159
FLR · 6 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
8 h 10 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
2 h 5 m
€180-199
1 stop
FLR · 6 km
AmsterdamAMS
8 h 25 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
1 h 55 m
€232-255
2 stops
FLR · 6 km
RomeFCO, CIA
9 h 45 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
55 m
€136-139
1 stop
FLR · 6 km
BarcelonaBCN
9 h 0 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
1 h 35 m
€113-168
FLR · 6 km
MunichMUC
9 h 15 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
1 h 15 m
no fares
FLR · 6 km
MadridMAD
8 h 35 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
2 h 10 m
no fares
FLR · 6 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
8 h 50 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
1 h 30 m
no fares
FLR · 6 km
ZurichZRH
9 h 5 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
1 h 10 m
no fares
FLR · 6 km
DublinDUB
7 h 35 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
2 h 35 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

MeasureChicagoFlorence
Official languageItalian
CurrencyUS Dollar (USD)Euro (EUR)
SocketsAB120 V, 60 HzCFL230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-6, UTC-5 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number911112
Elevation179 m50 m
Main airportChicago O'Hare International Airport (ORD)25 km from centre272 non-stop destinationsFlorence Airport, Peretola (FLR)6 km from centre36 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureChicagoFlorence
City population2,746,388360,930
People per km²4,5293,528
Museums within 10 km43140
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km14
Distinct cuisines in the centre8762
Swim season, months above 21 °C1 month

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Chicago 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). 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.