Florence or Venice?

Venice is the one where a swim actually fits into the trip. The Lido has kilometres of fine sand on the open Adriatic, a short boat ride from San Marco, with shallow, gentle water that suits children, and Pellestrina is wilder if you want more space. The water is greenish rather than clear, and few people give it more than an afternoon.

Florence has no beach of its own. The Versilia sands near Viareggio take a full day there and back, so in the hot months a hotel pool or a public pool is the realistic way to cool off.

Florence eats better and more broadly. Its cooking is robust Tuscan fare: thick bistecca, bread soups, lampredotto from street carts and beans in green olive oil, with the Mercato Centrale and Sant'Ambrogio market to browse and Chianti country just south of town. The best meals are easy to find in Oltrarno trattorie.

Venice's strength is a single, very enjoyable habit: cicchetti and a small glass of wine at the counter of a bacaro, with lagoon seafood from the Rialto market. Away from the bar counter, good restaurants take more effort to find among the picture-menu places on the main routes, and there is little beyond Venetian and Italian cooking.

Both cities rank with Europe's greatest for art and architecture, but you experience them differently. Florence's treasures are gathered in museums and churches: the Uffizi, David in the Accademia, the Bargello's sculpture and Brunelleschi's dome, all within a few streets. That means a lot of queues and advance booking.

In Venice the whole city is the sight, palaces and churches rising from the water with nothing modern in the way. Its painters are often seen where they were meant to hang, Titian in the Frari and Tintoretto at San Rocco, and the Guggenheim and the Biennale add modern and contemporary art that Florence does not match.

Neither is a city for clubbing, but Florence keeps going later. Piazza Santo Spirito fills with people and drinks on warm nights, Sant'Ambrogio draws a local crowd, students keep a few pubs loud, and in summer bars set up along the Arno.

Venice is busiest at aperitivo time, in the bacari around the Rialto and along the Fondamenta della Misericordia, and Campo Santa Margherita holds a student crowd a little longer. By midnight the canals are dark and silent, which makes for a lovely walk but not much of a night out.

Florence has the better outdoors on its doorstep. A bus climbs to the olive terraces of Fiesole, the Chianti hills are classic walking and cycling country, and the Casentino forests and Apuan Alps are within a long morning's drive.

Venice's nature is the lagoon, flat but unlike anything around Florence: salt marshes near Torcello with herons and flamingos, kayaking, and lessons in rowing Venetian-style standing up. Beyond that it is a long way to real hills, and green space in the city is scarce.

Both are superb bases, and Florence is the stronger one. Siena, Pisa, Lucca, San Gimignano and the Chianti villages are all close, Bologna is under forty minutes by fast train, and the Val d'Orcia lies further south, so a week of outings never repeats itself.

Venice offers Padua, Vicenza and Verona by train, the Palladian villas along the Brenta and the Prosecco hills. What it has that Florence lacks is outings by boat: Murano's glass furnaces, Burano's painted houses and the near-empty marshes of Torcello.

Neither city is built around children, and they come out about even, but the trade-offs differ. Venice wins on novelty, with boats instead of buses, no traffic and the Lido beach. Its hundreds of stepped bridges, though, make pushchairs a constant struggle, so it suits older children best.

Florence's attractions are aimed more at adults, though climbing the dome, the secret passages of Palazzo Vecchio, the Museo Galileo and the Boboli Gardens work well. The Pinocchio park at Collodi makes an easy outing, and spring or autumn avoids the worst heat.

Florence is easier. The Duomo, Uffizi, Accademia and Pitti Palace are all within twenty minutes of each other on foot, trams reach the airport, and Santa Maria Novella station sits in the centre for rail day trips.

Venice also has to be walked, but over longer distances, through alleys that dead-end at canals and across bridges with steps that are hard on luggage and tired legs. The vaporetto is a pleasure on the Grand Canal but slow and crowded on the main lines.

Florence has more to buy. Its leather workshops and the San Lorenzo stalls, the gilders and restorers of the Oltrarno, the Ponte Vecchio goldsmiths, Via de' Tornabuoni's fashion houses and the antique dealers of Via Maggio give it real range for a city its size.

Venice's crafts are more singular: Murano glass, Burano lace, papier-mâché masks and velvet furlane slippers. The catch is how much imported imitation fills the main routes, so the real workshops in Dorsoduro, Castello and on Murano take some finding, and mainstream shopping is out at Mestre.

Your money goes further in Florence. Central hotel rooms and museum tickets are still dear, but you can walk almost everywhere, eat well on lampredotto, panini and market counters with cheap house wine, and save more by staying across the river or near the station.

Venice is among the costliest places to stay in Italy, and the water adds costs Florence does not have: boats priced for visitors rather than residents, and famously steep table service on Piazza San Marco. Eating cicchetti at a bar counter, sleeping at Mestre and coming in late autumn or winter all bring it down.

The two are close, with a different flavour. Venice has La Fenice, where Verdi and Rossini premiered operas, a nightly choice of Vivaldi concerts in the churches where he worked, and the Biennale's festivals of contemporary music, theatre and dance.

Florence claims the birth of opera and hosts the Maggio Musicale, one of Europe's oldest music festivals, at its own opera house, with theatre at the eighteenth-century Pergola. In both, jazz and rock venues are thin on the ground.

Florence's calm is mostly found beyond its walls. Montecatini Terme's grand spa halls are under an hour by train, the open-air sulphur pools at Saturnia and Bagno Vignoni make a longer outing, and a few nights on a farm stay in the hills is the classic way to slow down. In town, the Boboli and Bardini gardens early in the day are the quiet corners.

In Venice the quiet is in the city itself. With no traffic, early mornings and late evenings are hushed, especially on Giudecca and in Castello and Cannaregio, and the thermal mud of Abano Terme is about an hour away. In both cities, spas within town come down to hotel spas.