VacationSelector

Melbourne or Rome?

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

Your match

Melbourne
60
match

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

Rome
✓ Best match
72
match

Wins on sights concentration 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.

Scoreboard

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

MelbourneRome
Beaches & swimming. Melbourne leads by 22 points.22
MelbourneRome
Score5533
Swim season months05
Beaches 10 km193
Coast distance4 km24 km
Water distance4 km24 km
Places to eat. Melbourne leads by 15 points.15
MelbourneRome
Score7560
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,8882,241
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2910
Museums & heritage. Rome leads by 35 points.35
MelbourneRome
Score4984
Museums within 10 km42161
Museums within 2 km of centre2479
Share of museums within 2 km %5749
Unesco sites within 50 km17
Nightlife. Melbourne and Rome are level on 74.
MelbourneRome
Score7474
Drinking venues within 4 km1,9212,022
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,200912
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6245
Nightclubs within 4 km12485
Nature & day trips. Rome leads by 27 points.27
MelbourneRome
Score4370
Protected land share 50 km %619
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %8178
Park area within 2 km166 hectares172 hectares
Good for families. Rome leads by 26 points.26
MelbourneRome
Score6086
Tourist attractions within 2 km26126
Park area within 2 km166 hectares172 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km14
Sights concentration. Rome leads by 42 points.42
MelbourneRome
Score5799
Notable places within 2 km1031,125
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Rome leads by 18 points.18
MelbourneRome
Score5068
Price level global90.264.9
Daily budget—€155
Year-round weather. Melbourne leads by 5 points.5
MelbourneRome
Score7671
Monthly daytime high13.6 °C to 26.8 °C12 °C to 31.4 °C
Monthly rainfall45 mm to 69 mm21 mm to 114 mm
Dry months03
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
Melbourne
27
27
24
20
17
14
14
15
17
20
22
25
Rome
12
13
16
18
24
28
31
31
27
22
17
13
Sea temperature, °C
Melbourne
20
21
20
18
15
13
12
11
12
14
17
19
Rome
15
14
14
15
18
22
25
25
24
21
19
16
Rainfall, mm
Melbourne
46
48
45
58
50
58
46
52
60
56
69
65
Rome
67
69
57
75
62
33
21
38
70
97
114
103
Daylight, hours per day
Melbourne
15
14
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
15
Rome
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Melbourne
9
7
7
6
5
4
4
6
6
7
7
9
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. Melbourne: 1991-2020 normals, Latrobe University / Kingsbury (13.1 km from centre). Rome: 1991-2020 normals, Roma / Ciampino (15.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromMelbourneRome
SingaporeSIN, XSP
7 h 45 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
12 h 30 m
no fares
FCO · 23 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
17 h 55 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
2 h 15 m
€136-291
FCO · 23 km
SydneySYD, WSI
1 h 30 m
€119-126
MEL · 19 km
19 h 55 m
no fares
FCO · 23 km
DohaDOH
14 h 45 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
5 h 25 m
no fares
FCO · 23 km
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
15 h 40 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
12 h 40 m
no fares
FCO · 23 km
Hong KongHKG
9 h 25 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
11 h 35 m
no fares
FCO · 23 km
PerthPER
3 h 50 m
€298-496
1 stop
MEL · 19 km
16 h 25 m
no fares
FCO · 23 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
14 h 20 m
€856-961
2 stops
MEL · 19 km
5 h 45 m
€270-340
FCO · 23 km
Abu DhabiAUH
14 h 20 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
5 h 45 m
€280-355
2 stops
FCO · 23 km
ShanghaiPVG, SHA
10 h 5 m
€542-1650
1 stop
MEL · 19 km
11 h 25 m
no fares
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

MeasureMelbourneRome
Official languageEnglishItalian
CurrencyAustralian Dollar (AUD)Euro (EUR)
SocketsI230 V, 50 HzCFL230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+10, UTC+11 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number000112
Elevation31 m21 m
Main airportMelbourne Airport (MEL)19 km from centre66 non-stop destinationsRome–Fiumicino Leonardo da Vinci International Airport (FCO)23 km from centre230 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureMelbourneRome
City population5,350,7052,748,109
People per km²5352,135
Museums within 10 km42177
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km17
Distinct cuisines in the centre8665
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone5 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Melbourne 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). Public holidays from Nager.Date (MIT). Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates. 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. Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. 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.

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.