Genoa or Matera?

In Genoa a swim fits into an ordinary city day. The pebble cove at Boccadasse, the bathing establishments along Corso Italia and the platforms below Nervi are all inside the city, and the Riviera towns are a short train ride away. Expect pebbles, rented loungers and crowded summer weekends.

Matera has no sea of its own. The Ionian beaches at Metaponto and Policoro are about 45 minutes away by car and have the softer sand of the two, long, wide and shallow, which suits young children. Without a car, though, most visitors to Matera never reach the sea.

Genoa offers more to eat and more ways to eat it. There is oily focaccia at breakfast and trofie with pesto at lunch, farinata and fried fish by the slice from the old-town shops, seafood in the harbour trattorias, and the Mercato Orientale to browse.

Matera's food is the plainer peasant cooking of Basilicata, built around its horn-shaped durum loaf, pulses, hand-made pasta and crackling dried peppers, with Aglianico in the glass instead of Ligurian whites. It is honest and good, but a small town gives only a few meals' worth of variety, and there is no street food or market to explore.

Genoa has more to see over several days. There is one of Europe's largest medieval quarters, the Rolli palaces of Via Garibaldi with their Van Dycks and Rubens, the striped cathedral, the maritime museum and the marble sculpture of Staglieno cemetery.

Matera has fewer sights, but they are unlike anything else: cave dwellings and rock churches with Byzantine frescoes stacked up the side of a gorge and lived in since prehistory, plus a cistern under the main piazza that you can walk through. Genoa rewards days of exploring, while the Sassi can be covered in a couple of slow walks, ideally at dusk.

Neither is a clubbing city, but Genoa has far more going on after dinner. Students fill the small bars around Piazza delle Erbe, the Porto Antico adds waterfront bars, and in summer the crowd moves to Corso Italia and the beach clubs. In Matera the evening means the passeggiata, a long dinner and a glass of wine on a terrace above the Sassi, and outside summer the town goes quiet soon after dinner.

Genoa's outdoors is more varied because it has the sea as well as hills. There is the fortress trail above Righi, the cliff paths of the Portofino promontory down to San Fruttuoso, the Cinque Terre by train, and boats out into the Pelagos Sanctuary to see whales and dolphins.

Matera's landscape is the dramatic Gravina gorge and the stony Murgia plateau. Paths drop from the Sassi and climb to abandoned rock churches and Neolithic sites, and the Lucanian Dolomites and the Pollino are further off by car. It is wilder country, but bare and very hot in midsummer.

Both make excellent bases, and the real difference is how you travel. From Genoa the trips follow one railway line: Camogli, Portofino, Sestri Levante and the Cinque Terre to the east, Finale Ligure and Noli to the west, and Milan or Turin for a city day, all without a car.

Matera's outings spread across two regions. They include the trulli of Alberobello, Ostuni and the Valle d'Itria, Castel del Monte, Polignano a Mare, the abandoned town of Craco and the mountain villages of Castelmezzano and Pietrapertosa. They are just as rewarding, but almost all of them need a hire car.

Genoa is much easier with children. The aquarium at the Porto Antico can fill half a day, with the science centre, the biosphere and the walk-through submarine at the Galata museum next door, and the funiculars and public lifts are rides in themselves. The steep lanes of the old town are still hard going with a pushchair.

In Matera older children enjoy the caves and the underground cistern, but nothing in the town is built for them. The stone steps of the Sassi defeat a pushchair, and summer afternoons are hot with little shade.

Genoa is hilly but well connected. Funiculars, a rack railway and public lifts climb the slopes, a short metro line runs through the centre, and the coastal railway reaches Nervi and the Riviera towns.

Matera is simpler within the town, with a flat upper town and the Sassi a short walk below, all on foot. Beyond the town it is harder: the narrow-gauge line to Bari is slow, buses are sparse, and a car becomes almost essential.

Neither is a shopping destination, but Genoa has more of it: the arcades of Via XX Settembre, Italian labels on Via Roma and in the Galleria Mazzini, and old-town shops selling candied fruit, silver filigree and coral. Matera's shopping is small and aimed at visitors, mostly painted cuccù whistles and tufa carvings in the Sassi, and the best things to take home are dried peppers and Aglianico.

The two cost about the same overall, but the money goes in different places. In Genoa, focaccia and farinata make cheap meals and central hotels are fair for northern Italy, while the Riviera resorts and paid loungers make beach days dearer. In Matera the upper-town trattorias are inexpensive and walking the Sassi and the Murgia costs nothing, but the cave hotels in the Sassi are priced as a speciality, so you save most by sleeping in the newer town.

Genoa has a real if modest programme: opera, ballet and concerts at the Teatro Carlo Felice, plays in Italian from the Teatro Nazionale, Paganini concerts, and small clubs that keep the singer-songwriter tradition alive. Matera has little beyond conservatory concerts and summer events such as its jazz festival, and the Festa della Bruna is the one big night of the year.

Neither city has thermal baths or a bathing culture, so relaxing comes down to the setting. In Genoa the calm is in Nervi's promenade and villa gardens and in slow lunches along the Riviera, with the thermal waters of Acqui Terme a little over an hour away, but the centre itself is noisy. Matera is slower everywhere, and its hotel spas, set in candlelit cave rooms with pools cut into the rock, are an unusual place to unwind.