VacationSelector

Naples or Bologna?

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

Your match

Naples
✓ Best match
63
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and sights concentration with your weighting.

Bologna
52
match

Wins on good for families and places to eat 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 Bologna if you want a compact city trip built around eating and walking, with more attractions and park space near the centre and no need for the sea.

Choose Naples if the coast matters: 29 beaches within reach, sea reaching 26°C at its warmest, and a denser core of notable places, museums and bars.

Scoreboard

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

NaplesBologna
Beaches & swimming. Naples leads by 76 points.76
NaplesBologna
Score760
Swim season months50
Beaches 10 km292
Coast distance1 km74 km
Water distance1 km—
Places to eat. Bologna leads by 12 points.12
NaplesBologna
Score4658
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,244822
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km720
Museums & heritage. Naples leads by 11 points.11
NaplesBologna
Score7867
Museums within 10 km8458
Museums within 2 km of centre6843
Share of museums within 2 km %8174
Unesco sites within 50 km53
Nightlife. Naples leads by 13 points.13
NaplesBologna
Score6653
Drinking venues within 4 km1,389720
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre964531
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6974
Nightclubs within 4 km4030
Nature & day trips. Bologna leads by 2 points.2
NaplesBologna
Score3739
Protected land share 50 km %77
Landscape blanket share 50 km %01
Land share of disc %56100
Park area within 2 km41 hectares119 hectares
Good for families. Bologna leads by 14 points.14
NaplesBologna
Score4155
Tourist attractions within 2 km1132
Park area within 2 km41 hectares119 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km30
Sights concentration. Naples leads by 18 points.18
NaplesBologna
Score7860
Notable places within 2 km351120
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Naples and Bologna are level on 68.
NaplesBologna
Score6868
Price level global64.964.9
Daily budget€155€155
Year-round weather. Naples leads by 6 points.6
NaplesBologna
Score7367
Monthly daytime high13.1 °C to 31.4 °C7 °C to 31.5 °C
Monthly rainfall17 mm to 159 mm34 mm to 75 mm
Dry months35
0255075100

Where they differ

Bologna has about three times as many tourist attractions and as much park space near the centre as Naples, which makes for gentler days with children. Its restaurants cover a much wider range of kitchens, even if there are fewer of them.

Naples has the coast: 29 beaches nearby against Bologna's 2, and five months with the sea at 21°C or more. Its centre holds about three times as many notable places within walking distance, and about twice as many places to drink.

Where they are alike

Neither city is a base for wild country. Around both, 7% of the land is protected, and day trips work as an add-on rather than the reason to come. Bologna keeps more park space in the centre itself, but the wider landscape is equally lightly protected.

Both are warm and sunny, with high summer around 31-32°C, and both hold a substantial stock of museums plus UNESCO-listed places within day-trip reach, so wet afternoons are easy to fill indoors.

Which traveller are you?

Travelling with children: Bologna, with about three times as many tourist attractions and as much park space near the centre. Naples answers with 3 theme parks within reach and the beaches, so the choice turns on whether swimming matters.

Swimming combined with sightseeing: Naples. 29 beaches nearby, five months of sea at 21°C or more, and a dense historic centre where most of the notable places are within walking distance.

Eating your way through a city: Bologna has fewer restaurants but a far wider range of kitchens, and a walkable centre. Naples suits later nights, with more bars and clubs than Bologna.

What the numbers don't tell you

The value figures are identical for the two because they reflect a national price level rather than either city, and the daily budget of €155 is one national estimate rather than a measurement of Bologna or Naples. The value comparison here carries no information, and neither city is the cheaper trip on this evidence.

Naples's beach strength rests on the months everyone else travels: the sea only passes 21°C for about five months, and those are also the driest and busiest. Bologna's wider annual range includes 32°C in midsummer and 7°C in January, two uncomfortable ends.

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
Naples
13
14
16
19
24
28
31
31
28
23
18
14
Bologna
7
10
15
19
24
29
32
32
26
19
13
8
Sea temperature, °C
Naples
15
14
14
16
19
23
25
26
24
22
19
17
Bologna
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Naples
89
69
82
73
54
29
17
18
78
92
159
108
Bologna
36
36
49
54
50
37
34
40
75
75
70
58
Daylight, hours per day
Naples
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Bologna
9
10
12
13
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Naples
4
5
6
7
8
9
11
10
8
6
4
4
Bologna
3
4
6
7
8
10
11
10
7
5
3
3

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Naples: 1991-2020 normals, Grazzanise (28.3 km from centre). Bologna: 1991-2020 normals, Bologna / Borgo Panigale (5.5 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Bologna is at its best in May and June, with highs of 24-29°C and rain around 40-50mm. July and August reach 32°C, and from September onwards rainfall sits near 75mm a month and stays there through autumn.

Naples works from June to September, with only 17-18mm of rain at the height of summer and sea at 25-26°C. Its winters are milder than Bologna's but considerably wetter, rising to 159mm in November.

Getting there

Flying fromNaplesBologna
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 35 m
€90-167
1 stop
NAP · 7 km
2 h 0 m
€114-267
BLQ · 6 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
2 h 10 m
€108-170
NAP · 7 km
1 h 40 m
€158-262
1 stop
BLQ · 6 km
CataniaCTA
1 h 5 m
€36-65
NAP · 7 km
1 h 40 m
€41-45
BLQ · 6 km
BarcelonaBCN
1 h 50 m
€103-165
1 stop
NAP · 7 km
1 h 40 m
€42-75
BLQ · 6 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
2 h 5 m
€167-197
1 stop
NAP · 7 km
2 h 25 m
€154-191
1 stop
BLQ · 6 km
PalermoPMO
1 h 0 m
€39-94
NAP · 7 km
1 h 30 m
€83-129
1 stop
BLQ · 6 km
MadridMAD
2 h 25 m
no fares
NAP · 7 km
2 h 10 m
no fares
BLQ · 6 km
MunichMUC
1 h 40 m
€157-224
1 stop
NAP · 7 km
1 h 10 m
no fares
BLQ · 6 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
9 h 0 m
no fares
NAP · 7 km
8 h 30 m
€637-650
VCE · 138 km
CasablancaCMN
3 h 10 m
no fares
NAP · 7 km
3 h 5 m
€180-238
1 stop
BLQ · 6 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 2026-10, 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

MeasureNaplesBologna
Official languageItalianItalian
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCFL230 V, 50 HzCFL230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation17 m54 m
Main airportNaples International Airport (NAP)7 km from centre131 non-stop destinationsBologna Guglielmo Marconi Airport (BLQ)6 km from centre97 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureNaplesBologna
City population913,462387,971
People per km²7,6762,754
Museums within 10 km6566
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km53
Distinct cuisines in the centre3162
Swim season, months above 21 °C5 months–

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Naples or Bologna 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 2026-09-01. Typical prices can be up to 7 days old. Daily budgets are estimates from country price levels.