VacationSelector

Marseille or Pisa?

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

Your match

Marseille
✓ Best match
57
match

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

Pisa
45
match

Wins on value for money and museums & heritage 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 Marseille if you want the sea at the edge of the centre, 64 beaches nearby, and far more choice of restaurants and places to drink within walking distance.

Choose Pisa if heritage matters more than eating out: 3 UNESCO-listed places within day-trip reach, more park space near the centre, and a warmer sea in late summer, 10km from town.

Scoreboard

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

MarseillePisa
Beaches & swimming. Marseille leads by 46 points.46
MarseillePisa
Score6721
Swim season months24
Beaches 10 km641
Coast distance0 km10 km
Water distance0 km10 km
Places to eat. Marseille leads by 41 points.41
MarseillePisa
Score7534
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,320379
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km399
Museums & heritage. Pisa leads by 5 points.5
MarseillePisa
Score5055
Museums within 10 km3327
Museums within 2 km of centre2322
Share of museums within 2 km %7081
Unesco sites within 50 km13
Nightlife. Marseille leads by 20 points.20
MarseillePisa
Score4828
Drinking venues within 4 km544232
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre454203
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8388
Nightclubs within 4 km303
Nature & day trips. Pisa leads by 2 points.2
MarseillePisa
Score3739
Protected land share 50 km %159
Landscape blanket share 50 km %130
Land share of disc %5665
Park area within 2 km25 hectares40 hectares
Good for families. Pisa leads by 3 points.3
MarseillePisa
Score4447
Tourist attractions within 2 km1720
Park area within 2 km25 hectares40 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km42
Sights concentration. Marseille leads by 11 points.11
MarseillePisa
Score5847
Notable places within 2 km11158
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Pisa leads by 6 points.6
MarseillePisa
Score6268
Price level global73.764.9
Daily budget€160€155
Year-round weather. Marseille leads by 5 points.5
MarseillePisa
Score7570
Monthly daytime high11.8 °C to 30.7 °C11.4 °C to 30.3 °C
Monthly rainfall11 mm to 82 mm32 mm to 132 mm
Dry months62
0255075100

Where they differ

Marseille has the sea at the centre, 0km away, and 64 beaches close by against Pisa's one. It has about three times as many restaurants near the centre, a wider range of kitchens, twice as many places to drink and many times as many nightclubs, most of them close to the middle.

Pisa's coast is 10km out, but its sea holds 21°C or more for four months against Marseille's two. It has 3 UNESCO-listed places within day-trip reach, more attractions near the centre and about twice as much park space.

Where they are alike

Nature and day trips are the closest match: neither is a base for wild country. Protected land makes up 15% of the ground around Marseille and 9% around Pisa, while Pisa holds about twice as much park space near its centre.

They are close, too, on families, heritage and climate. Both have theme parks within reach, museums in similar numbers, daytime highs of about 12-31°C across the year, and national daily budgets of €160 and €155 that sit near each other.

Which traveller are you?

Swimmers and beach days: Marseille, where the sea meets the centre at 0km and 64 beaches sit within reach. Pisa has one beach 10km out, though its water stays warm later in the season.

Eating and evenings out: Marseille again. It has roughly three times as many restaurants near the centre, a wider range of kitchens, and far more bars and clubs, most of them centrally placed.

Families and heritage: Pisa is the steadier choice, with more attractions and about twice as much park space near the centre, plus 3 UNESCO-listed places within day-trip reach. Marseille counters with 4 theme parks against 2.

What the numbers don't tell you

The daily budget figures, €160 and €155, are national price levels for restaurants and hotels, not measurements of Marseille or Pisa. A heavily visited city can sit further from its own country's average than these two figures sit from each other, so the small gap says nothing about which trip costs more.

Marseille's beach count is about supply, not season: its sea passes 21°C for half as long as Pisa's, which manages it from a single beach 10km from the centre. And the months that rate best in both are the hot, dry ones, when the coast draws the most people.

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
Marseille
12
13
16
19
24
28
31
30
26
21
16
12
Pisa
11
13
16
18
23
27
30
30
26
21
16
12
Sea temperature, °C
Marseille
13
13
13
14
16
19
21
22
21
19
17
15
Pisa
14
13
14
15
18
22
24
25
23
20
18
16
Rainfall, mm
Marseille
47
30
29
51
38
28
11
26
82
72
76
41
Pisa
68
58
59
65
63
41
32
35
102
125
132
95
Daylight, hours per day
Marseille
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Pisa
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Marseille
5
6
8
8
10
11
12
11
9
6
5
4
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. Marseille: 1991-2020 normals, Marseille / Marignane (20.6 km from centre). Pisa: 1991-2020 normals, Pisa / S. Giusto (3.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Marseille peaks in June and holds into September. July is its driest month at 11mm with highs of 31°C, and the sea reaches 22°C in August. Autumn breaks the run, with 82mm in September and more after that.

Pisa also peaks in June, and its swimming season runs longer: the sea reaches 25°C in August and is still 23°C in September. Its autumn is much the wetter of the two, at 125mm in October and 132mm in November.

Getting there

Flying fromMarseillePisa
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 50 m
€65-134
1 stop
MRS · 21 km
2 h 5 m
€48-62
PSA · 4 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 25 m
€110-119
MRS · 21 km
1 h 40 m
no fares
PSA · 4 km
TiranaTIA
2 h 5 m
no fares
MRS · 21 km
1 h 35 m
no fares
PSA · 4 km
BrusselsBRU, CRL
1 h 40 m
€86-123
1 stop
MRS · 21 km
1 h 45 m
no fares
PSA · 4 km
RomeFCO, CIA
1 h 25 m
no fares
MRS · 21 km
55 m
€136-139
1 stop
FLR · 65 km
PalermoPMO
1 h 40 m
no fares
MRS · 21 km
1 h 25 m
no fares
PSA · 4 km
AmsterdamAMS
1 h 50 m
no fares
MRS · 21 km
1 h 55 m
€210-262
1 stop
PSA · 4 km
CataniaCTA
1 h 55 m
no fares
MRS · 21 km
1 h 35 m
€55-66
PSA · 4 km
NantesNTE
1 h 30 m
€72-162
MRS · 21 km
1 h 55 m
no fares
FLR · 65 km
MarrakechRAK
2 h 45 m
no fares
MRS · 21 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 2026-09 to 2026-09, 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

MeasureMarseillePisa
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
Elevation0 m4 m
Main airportMarseille Provence Airport (MRS)21 km from centre125 non-stop destinationsPisa International Airport (PSA)4 km from centre81 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureMarseillePisa
City population886,04088,737
People per km²3,683479
Museums within 10 km2727
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km13
Distinct cuisines in the centre9329
Swim season, months above 21 °C2 months4 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Marseille 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. Sea surface temperature from NOAA OISST v2.1, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. 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. 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.