VacationSelector

Rome or Sydney?

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 sights concentration and museums & heritage with your weighting.

Sydney
64
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.

RomeSydney
Beaches & swimming. Sydney leads by 27 points.27
RomeSydney
Score3360
Swim season months56
Beaches 10 km3160
Coast distance24 km7 km
Water distance24 km7 km
Places to eat. Sydney leads by 18 points.18
RomeSydney
Score6078
Restaurants within 2 km of centre2,2412,205
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1031
Museums & heritage. Rome leads by 33 points.33
RomeSydney
Score8451
Museums within 10 km16144
Museums within 2 km of centre7920
Share of museums within 2 km %4945
Unesco sites within 50 km72
Nightlife. Sydney leads by 1 points.1
RomeSydney
Score7475
Drinking venues within 4 km2,0222,050
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre9121,405
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %4569
Nightclubs within 4 km85120
Nature & day trips. Rome leads by 12 points.12
RomeSydney
Score7058
Protected land share 50 km %1910
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %7852
Park area within 2 km172 hectares115 hectares
Good for families. Rome leads by 22 points.22
RomeSydney
Score8664
Tourist attractions within 2 km12637
Park area within 2 km172 hectares115 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km42
Sights concentration. Rome leads by 39 points.39
RomeSydney
Score9960
Notable places within 2 km1,125123
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Rome leads by 18 points.18
RomeSydney
Score6850
Price level global64.990.2
Daily budget€155—
Year-round weather. Sydney leads by 10 points.10
RomeSydney
Score7181
Monthly daytime high12 °C to 31.4 °C17.7 °C to 27.7 °C
Monthly rainfall21 mm to 114 mm55 mm to 121 mm
Dry months30
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
Sydney
28
27
26
23
21
18
18
19
22
24
25
26
Sea temperature, °C
Rome
15
14
14
15
18
22
25
25
24
21
19
16
Sydney
23
23
23
22
21
20
19
18
18
19
20
21
Rainfall, mm
Rome
67
69
57
75
62
33
21
38
70
97
114
103
Sydney
80
116
90
95
89
121
70
63
57
55
71
68
Daylight, hours per day
Rome
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sydney
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Sunshine, hours per day
Rome
4
5
6
7
9
10
11
11
8
6
4
4
Sydney
8
6
7
7
7
6
7
8
8
8
7
8

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Rome: 1991-2020 normals, Roma / Ciampino (15.1 km from centre). Sydney: 1991-2020 normals, Sydney Airport (3.7 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromRomeSydney
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
2 h 0 m
€91-122
FCO · 23 km
20 h 35 m
no fares
SYD · 9 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 20 m
€76-143
1 stop
FCO · 23 km
20 h 40 m
€931-1073
1 stop
SYD · 9 km
SeoulICN, GMP
11 h 15 m
€630-760
FCO · 23 km
10 h 30 m
€548-574
1 stop
SYD · 9 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
8 h 45 m
€446-597
FCO · 23 km
19 h 30 m
no fares
SYD · 9 km
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
12 h 40 m
no fares
FCO · 23 km
14 h 50 m
no fares
SYD · 9 km
SingaporeSIN, XSP
12 h 30 m
no fares
FCO · 23 km
8 h 5 m
€498-549
1 stop
SYD · 9 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
2 h 15 m
€136-291
FCO · 23 km
18 h 15 m
no fares
SYD · 9 km
DohaDOH
5 h 25 m
no fares
FCO · 23 km
15 h 15 m
€997-1100
SYD · 9 km
Hong KongHKG
11 h 35 m
no fares
FCO · 23 km
9 h 20 m
no fares
SYD · 9 km
TokyoHND, NRT
12 h 20 m
no fares
FCO · 23 km
9 h 50 m
€671
SYD · 9 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

MeasureRomeSydney
Official languageItalianEnglish
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Australian Dollar (AUD)
SocketsCFL230 V, 50 HzI230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+10, UTC+11 in summer
Emergency number112000
Elevation21 m6 m
Main airportRome–Fiumicino Leonardo da Vinci International Airport (FCO)23 km from centre230 non-stop destinationsSydney Kingsford Smith International Airport (SYD)9 km from centre94 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureRomeSydney
City population2,748,1095,450,496
People per km²2,135449
Museums within 10 km17738
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km72
Distinct cuisines in the centre6579
Swim season, months above 21 °C5 months6 months

Where else could you go?

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