VacationSelector

Lyon or Pisa?

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

Your match

Lyon
✓ Best match
52
match

Wins on places to eat and nightlife with your weighting.

Pisa
45
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and nature & day trips with your weighting.

What matters to you?

Pick a travel style or drag the sliders. The match scores above update as you do.

The verdict

Choose Lyon if the eating and the evenings are the point: many times as many restaurants near the centre as Pisa, a much wider range of kitchens, and more places to drink after dinner.

Choose Pisa if you want warmth and water: daytime highs reaching 30°C, sea at 21°C or more for four months, and a summer that stays dry when Lyon's does not.

Scoreboard

Each measure scored 0 to 100. Open a row for the figures behind the score.

LyonPisa
Beaches & swimming. Pisa leads by 21 points.21
LyonPisa
Score021
Swim season months04
Beaches 10 km261
Coast distance253 km10 km
Water distance—10 km
Places to eat. Lyon leads by 45 points.45
LyonPisa
Score7934
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,691379
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km409
Museums & heritage. Lyon and Pisa are level on 55.
LyonPisa
Score5555
Museums within 10 km5327
Museums within 2 km of centre2522
Share of museums within 2 km %4781
Unesco sites within 50 km23
Nightlife. Lyon leads by 30 points.30
LyonPisa
Score5828
Drinking venues within 4 km866232
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre611203
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7188
Nightclubs within 4 km473
Nature & day trips. Pisa leads by 6 points.6
LyonPisa
Score3339
Protected land share 50 km %69
Landscape blanket share 50 km %60
Land share of disc %10065
Park area within 2 km120 hectares40 hectares
Good for families. Lyon leads by 12 points.12
LyonPisa
Score5947
Tourist attractions within 2 km2520
Park area within 2 km120 hectares40 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km22
Sights concentration. Lyon leads by 7 points.7
LyonPisa
Score5447
Notable places within 2 km8658
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Pisa leads by 6 points.6
LyonPisa
Score6268
Price level global73.764.9
Daily budget€160€155
Year-round weather. Pisa leads by 6 points.6
LyonPisa
Score6470
Monthly daytime high7 °C to 28 °C11.4 °C to 30.3 °C
Monthly rainfall43 mm to 101 mm32 mm to 132 mm
Dry months02
0255075100

Where they differ

Lyon has many times as many restaurants near the centre as Pisa, and a much wider range of kitchens, so a week of dinners need not repeat itself. Evenings are the second gap: about three times as many places to drink and far more nightclubs, most of them close to the centre.

Pisa answers with the sea. It has 1 beach nearby against Lyon's 26, but four months of water at 21°C or more, reaching 25°C in August, where Lyon has no swimming season at all.

Where they are alike

Museums and heritage is where they finish level. Lyon holds about twice as many museums; Pisa has 3 UNESCO-listed places within day-trip reach against Lyon's 2, and packs its collections more tightly around the centre.

They are close, too, on weather, on what lies outside the city and on price level. Neither sits in much protected country, 9% of the land around Pisa and 6% around Lyon, and the national price estimates for France and Italy sit close together.

Which traveller are you?

If you travel to eat and to stay out late, Lyon: many times the restaurant choice of Pisa, a much wider range of kitchens, and more bars and clubs close to the centre.

If the point is sun and swimming, Pisa: daytime highs of 11-30°C across the year against Lyon's 7-28°C, four months of sea at 21°C or more, and the drier high summer of the two.

Families with children lean to Lyon: more attractions within walking reach and about three times as much park space near the centre, though both have 2 theme parks within reach.

What the numbers don't tell you

The daily budget figure is a national estimate for France and Italy, rather than a measurement of Lyon or Pisa. A heavily visited city can sit well away from its own country's average, by more than the gap between the two figures, so nothing here tells you which of these two trips costs more.

And a beach count is not a swimming season. Lyon has 26 beaches nearby but no sea and no water temperatures behind that number; Pisa has 1 beach and four months warm enough to use it, which concentrates a small coast into a short stretch of the year.

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
Lyon
7
9
14
17
21
26
28
28
23
18
11
8
Pisa
11
13
16
18
23
27
30
30
26
21
16
12
Sea temperature, °C
Lyon
No coastline within reach
Pisa
14
13
14
15
18
22
24
25
23
20
18
16
Rainfall, mm
Lyon
51
43
50
68
82
73
66
68
84
101
88
54
Pisa
68
58
59
65
63
41
32
35
102
125
132
95
Daylight, hours per day
Lyon
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Pisa
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Lyon
2
3
6
6
7
9
9
8
6
4
3
2
Pisa
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. Lyon: 1991-2020 normals, Lyon / Bron (10.6 km from centre). Pisa: 1991-2020 normals, Pisa / S. Giusto (3.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Lyon is at its best from June to August, with highs of 26-28°C and rain of 66-73mm, enough for the odd shower. Its September is the drier of the two autumns and good for walking the city without the heat.

Pisa's summer is the warmer and the drier, 27-30°C with only 32-41mm of rain, and sea of 22-25°C for swimming. Its autumn is the one to avoid: October and November bring 125-132mm, far more than Lyon gets in the same weeks.

Getting there

Flying fromLyonPisa
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 35 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
2 h 5 m
€48-62
PSA · 4 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 10 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
1 h 40 m
no fares
PSA · 4 km
RomeFCO, CIA
1 h 30 m
€79-99
LYS · 20 km
55 m
€136-139
1 stop
FLR · 65 km
TiranaTIA
2 h 10 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
1 h 35 m
no fares
PSA · 4 km
PalermoPMO
1 h 55 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
1 h 25 m
no fares
PSA · 4 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
3 h 0 m
€167-217
LYS · 20 km
2 h 25 m
€154-191
1 stop
BLQ · 115 km
AmsterdamAMS
1 h 30 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
1 h 55 m
€210-262
1 stop
PSA · 4 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
1 h 20 m
€195-211
2 stops
LYS · 20 km
1 h 30 m
no fares
PSA · 4 km
BrusselsBRU, CRL
1 h 20 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
1 h 45 m
no fares
PSA · 4 km
MarrakechRAK
2 h 55 m
€105-126
LYS · 20 km
3 h 10 m
no fares
PSA · 4 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 2026-10 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

MeasureLyonPisa
Official languageFrenchItalian
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCE230 V, 50 HzCFL230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation160 m4 m
Main airportLyon Saint-Exupéry Airport (LYS)20 km from centre139 non-stop destinationsPisa International Airport (PSA)4 km from centre81 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureLyonPisa
City population519,12788,737
People per km²10,838479
Museums within 10 km4227
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km23
Distinct cuisines in the centre14829
Swim season, months above 21 °C–4 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Lyon or Pisa 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. Airport data from OurAirports (public domain). Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. Public holidays from Nager.Date (MIT). 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. Sea surface temperature from NOAA OISST v2.1, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. 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. Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates.

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.