VacationSelector

Rome or San Francisco?

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

Your match

Rome
✓ Best match
72
match

Wins on museums & heritage and sights concentration with your weighting.

San Francisco
62
match

Wins on beaches & swimming 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.

Scoreboard

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

RomeSan Francisco
Beaches & swimming. San Francisco leads by 27 points.27
RomeSan Francisco
Score3360
Swim season months50
Beaches 10 km344
Coast distance24 km2 km
Water distance24 km2 km
Places to eat. San Francisco leads by 23 points.23
RomeSan Francisco
Score6083
Restaurants within 2 km of centre2,2412,359
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1039
Museums & heritage. Rome leads by 40 points.40
RomeSan Francisco
Score8444
Museums within 10 km16157
Museums within 2 km of centre7929
Share of museums within 2 km %4951
Unesco sites within 50 km70
Nightlife. Rome leads by 6 points.6
RomeSan Francisco
Score7468
Drinking venues within 4 km2,0221,434
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre912928
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %4565
Nightclubs within 4 km8597
Nature & day trips. Rome leads by 10 points.10
RomeSan Francisco
Score7060
Protected land share 50 km %1917
Landscape blanket share 50 km %04
Land share of disc %7857
Park area within 2 km172 hectares45 hectares
Good for families. Rome leads by 29 points.29
RomeSan Francisco
Score8657
Tourist attractions within 2 km12648
Park area within 2 km172 hectares45 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km41
Sights concentration. Rome leads by 36 points.36
RomeSan Francisco
Score9963
Notable places within 2 km1,125147
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Rome leads by 25 points.25
RomeSan Francisco
Score6843
Price level global64.9100
Daily budget€155
Year-round weather. San Francisco leads by 7 points.7
RomeSan Francisco
Score7178
Monthly daytime high12 °C to 31.4 °C14 °C to 23.2 °C
Monthly rainfall21 mm to 114 mm0 mm to 105 mm
Dry months37
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
Rome
12
13
16
18
24
28
31
31
27
22
17
13
San Francisco
14
16
18
20
20
22
22
23
23
22
18
14
Sea temperature, °C
Rome
15
14
14
15
18
22
25
25
24
21
19
16
San Francisco
12
12
12
12
12
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
Rainfall, mm
Rome
67
69
57
75
62
33
21
38
70
97
114
103
San Francisco
105
87
91
26
16
5
0
1
7
27
72
87
Daylight, hours per day
Rome
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
San Francisco
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Rome
4
5
6
7
9
10
11
11
8
6
4
4
San Francisco
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Rome: 1991-2020 normals, Roma / Ciampino (15.1 km from centre). San Francisco: 1981-2010 normals, Alameda Naval Air Station (9.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromRomeSan Francisco
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
2 h 0 m
€91-122
FCO · 23 km
11 h 15 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
8 h 45 m
€446-597
FCO · 23 km
5 h 35 m
€286-328
1 stop
SFO · 18 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 20 m
€76-143
1 stop
FCO · 23 km
10 h 50 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
BarcelonaBCN
1 h 40 m
€44-74
FCO · 23 km
11 h 55 m
€653-1326
1 stop
SFO · 18 km
TokyoHND, NRT
12 h 20 m
no fares
FCO · 23 km
10 h 25 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
MadridMAD
2 h 15 m
€98-119
FCO · 23 km
11 h 40 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
SeoulICN, GMP
11 h 15 m
€630-760
FCO · 23 km
11 h 20 m
€662-735
SFO · 18 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
1 h 50 m
€96-147
FCO · 23 km
11 h 25 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
9 h 0 m
€487-550
1 stop
FCO · 23 km
4 h 55 m
€339-541
1 stop
SFO · 18 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
5 h 45 m
€270-340
FCO · 23 km
16 h 0 m
€1,005-1027
1 stop
SFO · 18 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

MeasureRomeSan Francisco
Official languageItalian
CurrencyEuro (EUR)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsCFL230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC-8, UTC-7 in summer
Emergency number112911
Elevation21 m16 m
Main airportRome–Fiumicino Leonardo da Vinci International Airport (FCO)23 km from centre230 non-stop destinationsSan Francisco International Airport (SFO)18 km from centre142 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureRomeSan Francisco
City population2,748,109873,965
People per km²2,1351,455
Museums within 10 km17750
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km70
Distinct cuisines in the centre65108
Swim season, months above 21 °C5 monthsNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Rome or San Francisco 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. Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates. 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.