VacationSelector

Marseille or Rome?

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

Your match

Marseille
57
match

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

Rome
✓ Best match
72
match

Wins on good for families and sights concentration 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.

MarseilleRome
Beaches & swimming. Marseille leads by 34 points.34
MarseilleRome
Score6733
Swim season months25
Beaches 10 km643
Coast distance0 km24 km
Water distance0 km24 km
Places to eat. Marseille leads by 15 points.15
MarseilleRome
Score7560
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,3202,241
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3910
Museums & heritage. Rome leads by 34 points.34
MarseilleRome
Score5084
Museums within 10 km33161
Museums within 2 km of centre2379
Share of museums within 2 km %7049
Unesco sites within 50 km17
Nightlife. Rome leads by 26 points.26
MarseilleRome
Score4874
Drinking venues within 4 km5442,022
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre454912
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8345
Nightclubs within 4 km3085
Nature & day trips. Rome leads by 33 points.33
MarseilleRome
Score3770
Protected land share 50 km %1519
Landscape blanket share 50 km %130
Land share of disc %5678
Park area within 2 km25 hectares172 hectares
Good for families. Rome leads by 42 points.42
MarseilleRome
Score4486
Tourist attractions within 2 km17126
Park area within 2 km25 hectares172 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km44
Sights concentration. Rome leads by 41 points.41
MarseilleRome
Score5899
Notable places within 2 km1111,125
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Rome leads by 6 points.6
MarseilleRome
Score6268
Price level global73.764.9
Daily budget€160€155
Year-round weather. Marseille leads by 4 points.4
MarseilleRome
Score7571
Monthly daytime high11.8 °C to 30.7 °C12 °C to 31.4 °C
Monthly rainfall11 mm to 82 mm21 mm to 114 mm
Dry months63
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
Marseille
12
13
16
19
24
28
31
30
26
21
16
12
Rome
12
13
16
18
24
28
31
31
27
22
17
13
Sea temperature, °C
Marseille
13
13
13
14
16
19
21
22
21
19
17
15
Rome
15
14
14
15
18
22
25
25
24
21
19
16
Rainfall, mm
Marseille
47
30
29
51
38
28
11
26
82
72
76
41
Rome
67
69
57
75
62
33
21
38
70
97
114
103
Daylight, hours per day
Marseille
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Rome
10
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
Rome
4
5
6
7
9
10
11
11
8
6
4
4

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Marseille: 1991-2020 normals, Marseille / Marignane (20.6 km from centre). Rome: 1991-2020 normals, Roma / Ciampino (15.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromMarseilleRome
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 25 m
€110-119
MRS · 21 km
2 h 0 m
€91-122
FCO · 23 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 50 m
€65-134
1 stop
MRS · 21 km
2 h 20 m
€76-143
1 stop
FCO · 23 km
MadridMAD
1 h 35 m
no fares
MRS · 21 km
2 h 15 m
€98-119
FCO · 23 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
2 h 55 m
€219-245
1 stop
MRS · 21 km
2 h 15 m
€136-291
FCO · 23 km
BarcelonaBCN
1 h 5 m
no fares
MRS · 21 km
1 h 40 m
€44-74
FCO · 23 km
PalermoPMO
1 h 40 m
no fares
MRS · 21 km
1 h 10 m
€38-50
FCO · 23 km
BrusselsBRU, CRL
1 h 40 m
€86-123
1 stop
MRS · 21 km
2 h 5 m
€94-137
1 stop
FCO · 23 km
Addis AbabaADD
6 h 35 m
no fares
MRS · 21 km
5 h 55 m
no fares
FCO · 23 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
7 h 45 m
no fares
MRS · 21 km
8 h 25 m
no fares
FCO · 23 km
SeoulICN, GMP
11 h 35 m
no fares
MRS · 21 km
11 h 15 m
€630-760
FCO · 23 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

MeasureMarseilleRome
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 m21 m
Main airportMarseille Provence Airport (MRS)21 km from centre125 non-stop destinationsRome–Fiumicino Leonardo da Vinci International Airport (FCO)23 km from centre230 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureMarseilleRome
City population886,0402,748,109
People per km²3,6832,135
Museums within 10 km27177
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km17
Distinct cuisines in the centre9365
Swim season, months above 21 °C2 months5 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Marseille or Rome 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.