Pisa or Zermatt?

Pisa has a real coast about 12km away, with long sandy beaches backed by pines at Tirrenia and Calambrone and shallow water that warms up nicely in midsummer. It is an afternoon off from sightseeing rather than a beach resort, but it is there.

Zermatt has no sea and no bathing lake, and its mountain tarns are far too cold to swim in. Swimming there means a hotel pool.

Pisa eats better and more cheaply, in plain Tuscan style: cecina from wood ovens, ribollita and game in the trattorias around the market square, with seafood towards the coast. Skip the menus by the tower and it is easy to eat well.

Zermatt's best meals are long lunches at mountain chalets above Findeln and Furi, with raclette, air-dried beef and Valais wines on a sunny terrace. Village dining leans towards hotel restaurants and a few expensive kitchens, and many places close between seasons.

Pisa is the place for sightseeing. The cathedral, baptistery, tower and Camposanto make one of Italy's great ensembles, and beyond them lie Piazza dei Cavalieri, Santa Maria della Spina and the San Matteo museum.

Zermatt's heritage is a single story, mountaineering, told in the Matterhorn Museum and the climbers' cemetery, with the old larch barns of the Hinterdorf as a reminder of the farming village. It is a morning's interest in a place people visit for the peaks.

Neither is a party town, but Pisa has more of an evening life, built on students drinking outside small bars around the old market and aperitivo along Borgo Stretto during term. In Zermatt the fun is seasonal: loud après-ski in slope-side bars in winter and a few late bars on the main street, while summer evenings end after dinner because the hikers have early starts.

Zermatt is one of the great Alpine settings, with the Matterhorn above the village, the Gorner Glacier and dozens of four-thousand-metre peaks around it. Lifts open up skiing that crosses into Italy and, in summer, trails such as the Five Lakes walk and the Europaweg.

Pisa's outdoors is gentler and flatter: the San Rossore park of pine forest and dunes for cycling and riding, the olive terraces of Monte Pisano, and the Apuan Alps further out for real hiking.

Pisa is an outstanding base. Florence is an hour by train, Lucca under half an hour, the Cinque Terre a little over an hour, and Volterra, San Gimignano and Siena are all within a day by car.

From Zermatt every outing begins with the long train down the valley, and the best of them, Sion with its castle hills and vineyards, is about an hour and a half away. Most visitors spend spare days in the mountains instead.

Both work about equally well with children, in different ways. Pisa offers a flat little centre, the tower lawn and the famous photo, plus shallow sandy beaches and bike rides in the park, with summer heat and crowds to plan around.

Zermatt's car-free streets make it calm and safe, with ski schools, nursery slopes and marmot-spotting walks, but rainy days are hard to fill and the highest viewpoints can be too cold and thin-aired for small children.

Both are easy on foot. Pisa is a small, flat city with the airport a shuttle train away and a station that serves as a hub for western Tuscany. Zermatt is car-free from the start, so you arrive by train and then walk or use electric taxis, while cog railways and gondolas carry you up into the mountains and leaving the valley takes over an hour.

Pisa has more to browse, if nothing exceptional: high-street fashion on Corso Italia, smarter shoes and pastry shops under the Borgo Stretto arcades, a produce market and a monthly antiques fair by the river.

Zermatt's one main street is all luxury watches, jewellery and souvenirs. The ski and mountaineering outfitters are the real reason to shop there.

The gap here is enormous. Pisa is moderately priced, with student-fed trattorias, mid-range rooms and a walkable centre, and the main costs are the tower climb and seaside loungers in summer.

Zermatt is expensive in every respect: rooms, terrace lunches and the lifts everyone uses. Self-catering or sleeping down the valley in Täsch helps a little.

Pisa has a proper opera house in the Teatro Verdi, with opera, concerts and ballet from autumn to spring, plus university chamber music and church recitals.

Zermatt has no theatre or concert hall. Outside its spring acoustic festival and late-summer chamber music weeks, live music means an après-ski band.

The two are roughly level, but for different reasons. Pisa has real thermal water, at San Giuliano Terme's 18th-century bath palace just outside the city and the larger public pool at Casciana Terme, and its pace slows once you are away from the tower. Zermatt has no springs but a dense cluster of fine hotel spas with mountain views, and its quiet comes from clean air and streets without cars.