VacationSelector

Marseille or Siena?

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.

Siena
39
match

Wins on museums & heritage and value for money 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 in the trip: 64 beaches within reach, the widest choice of places to eat and livelier evenings than Siena offers.

Choose Siena if the point is museums and a compact heritage centre, with 5 UNESCO-listed places within day-trip reach, and you can accept a wetter year and no swimming.

Scoreboard

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

MarseilleSiena
Beaches & swimming. Marseille leads by 67 points.67
MarseilleSiena
Score670
Swim season months20
Beaches 10 km640
Coast distance0 km64 km
Water distance0 km—
Places to eat. Marseille leads by 43 points.43
MarseilleSiena
Score7532
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,320242
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3911
Museums & heritage. Siena leads by 21 points.21
MarseilleSiena
Score5071
Museums within 10 km3355
Museums within 2 km of centre2351
Share of museums within 2 km %7093
Unesco sites within 50 km15
Nightlife. Marseille leads by 31 points.31
MarseilleSiena
Score4817
Drinking venues within 4 km544142
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre454119
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8384
Nightclubs within 4 km301
Nature & day trips. Marseille leads by 18 points.18
MarseilleSiena
Score3719
Protected land share 50 km %153
Landscape blanket share 50 km %130
Land share of disc %56100
Park area within 2 km25 hectares29 hectares
Good for families. Marseille leads by 13 points.13
MarseilleSiena
Score4431
Tourist attractions within 2 km1713
Park area within 2 km25 hectares29 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km40
Sights concentration. Marseille leads by 8 points.8
MarseilleSiena
Score5850
Notable places within 2 km11169
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Siena leads by 6 points.6
MarseilleSiena
Score6268
Price level global73.764.9
Daily budget€160€155
Year-round weather. Marseille leads by 11 points.11
MarseilleSiena
Score7564
Monthly daytime high11.8 °C to 30.7 °C8.9 °C to 31.3 °C
Monthly rainfall11 mm to 82 mm49 mm to 136 mm
Dry months60
0255075100

Where they differ

Marseille has the coast to itself: 64 beaches nearby and two months when the sea reaches 21°C or more, where Siena has neither. It also has many times as many restaurants near the centre and a far wider range of kitchens, plus about three times as many places to drink and many more nightclubs, most of them central.

Siena's strength is heritage: about twice as many museums as Marseille, and 5 UNESCO-listed places within day-trip reach against Marseille's 1. It also has somewhat more park space near the centre.

Where they are alike

The two countries' estimated daily budgets sit close together, €160 and €155, so the price data does not separate them before you look at anything else.

Both are compact in a similar way, with notable places clustered near the centre, so walking covers most of a visit. Their years run to a similar shape too, daytime highs of 12-31°C in Marseille and 9-31°C in Siena, with warm summers and mild winters.

Which traveller are you?

Anyone who wants to swim has only one option here: Marseille, with 64 beaches nearby and two months of sea at 21°C or more. Siena has no coast at all.

A traveller going for museums and old streets should choose Siena, which has about twice as many museums as Marseille and 5 UNESCO-listed places within day-trip reach, all around a small walkable centre.

Families lean to Marseille: somewhat more tourist attractions near the centre, 4 theme parks within reach and the beaches. Siena answers with more park space near the centre, and quiet evenings.

What the numbers don't tell you

The daily budget figures, €160 and €155, are national estimates of restaurant and hotel prices, not measurements of either city. A heavily visited city can sit further from its country's average than the gap between the two, so they say nothing about which trip costs more.

No weather station near Siena records sunshine hours, so that figure is missing rather than low: the sunshine side of the comparison is unmeasured, and Siena's monthly picture rests on temperature and rainfall alone. Marseille's beach advantage is also narrow in time, with the sea at 21°C or more only in July and August, the months when the coast is busiest.

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
Siena
9
11
15
20
23
28
31
31
26
20
14
10
Sea temperature, °C
Marseille
13
13
13
14
16
19
21
22
21
19
17
15
Siena
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Marseille
47
30
29
51
38
28
11
26
82
72
76
41
Siena
71
79
107
75
99
71
53
49
103
86
136
110
Daylight, hours per day
Marseille
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Siena
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
Siena
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Marseille: 1991-2020 normals, Marseille / Marignane (20.6 km from centre). Siena: 2006-2017 (rainfall 1991-2020) normals, Arezzo (45 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Marseille is best from May to September. July is hot and dry, 31°C with 11mm of rain, and the sea reaches 21-22°C at the height of summer. Autumn is the wet season, opening at 82mm in September.

Siena works best in late spring and again in September, with highs of 23-28°C either side of the midsummer peak of 31°C. Rain never really lets up, 71-103mm across those months and 136mm in November.

Getting there

Flying fromMarseilleSiena
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 25 m
€110-119
MRS · 21 km
1 h 40 m
€143-159
FLR · 55 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 50 m
€65-134
1 stop
MRS · 21 km
2 h 5 m
€180-199
1 stop
FLR · 55 km
AmsterdamAMS
1 h 50 m
no fares
MRS · 21 km
1 h 55 m
€232-255
2 stops
FLR · 55 km
TiranaTIA
2 h 5 m
no fares
MRS · 21 km
1 h 35 m
no fares
PSA · 86 km
RomeFCO, CIA
1 h 25 m
no fares
MRS · 21 km
55 m
€136-139
1 stop
FLR · 55 km
MadridMAD
1 h 35 m
no fares
MRS · 21 km
2 h 10 m
no fares
FLR · 55 km
MunichMUC
1 h 35 m
no fares
MRS · 21 km
1 h 15 m
no fares
FLR · 55 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
1 h 35 m
no fares
MRS · 21 km
1 h 30 m
no fares
FLR · 55 km
BarcelonaBCN
1 h 5 m
no fares
MRS · 21 km
1 h 35 m
€113-168
FLR · 55 km
MarrakechRAK
2 h 45 m
no fares
MRS · 21 km
3 h 10 m
no fares
PSA · 86 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

MeasureMarseilleSiena
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 m322 m
Main airportMarseille Provence Airport (MRS)21 km from centre125 non-stop destinationsFlorence Airport, Peretola (FLR)55 km from centre36 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureMarseilleSiena
City population886,04052,812
People per km²3,683446
Museums within 10 km2729
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km15
Distinct cuisines in the centre9325
Swim season, months above 21 °C2 months–

Where else could you go?

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