Sarajevo or Trieste?

These two are not close. Sarajevo is a valley city about three hours from the Adriatic, so swimming there means cold mountain rivers, Jablanica lake or a pool.

Trieste has the sea on its doorstep, though not on sand. Locals lie on Barcola's concrete terraces and pine-shaded lawns and climb down ladders into clear water, and there are prettier pebble coves at Sistiana, Duino and Grignano. If you want soft sand and shallow water you will be disappointed, but if you are happy swimming off rocks it works from June to September.

Both cities cook a narrow range very well and both treat coffee as a ritual, but the flavours are different. Sarajevo's food is Ottoman-Balkan: ćevapi in somun bread from the Baščaršija grills, burek sold by weight, lamb slow-cooked under a metal lid, and Bosnian coffee from a copper džezva with rahat lokum.

Trieste's food is Central European and Adriatic at once. The old buffets carve boiled pork for you, and menus offer jota soup, sardoni and presnitz, with espresso ordered in the city's own coffee vocabulary. Wine lovers also get the Karst osmize, farmhouses that open for a few weeks to sell their own Vitovska and Terrano. Sarajevo offers rakija and local beer instead.

Sarajevo is compact and intense. In a few flat streets you pass from the Ottoman bazaar of Baščaršija and the Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque to Austro-Hungarian avenues with the Orthodox and Catholic cathedrals and the Old Synagogue. The Latin Bridge, where the assassination of 1914 took place, and the memory of the siege at the Tunnel of Hope and the War Childhood Museum make it the more moving of the two. The medieval Sarajevo Haggadah in the National Museum is a rare treasure.

Trieste works on a grander scale, with Habsburg architecture set out along the sea. Piazza Unità opens onto the gulf, the Borgo Teresiano grid lines the Canal Grande, and San Giusto hill has its mosaics and castle, with a Roman theatre below. The white Miramare Castle on the coast is the set piece, and the Risiera di San Sabba is a sober counterweight.

Neither is a clubbing city, but Sarajevo has the livelier nights. Its café-bars fill from the afternoon and get louder after dark. The streets around Ferhadija stay busy on warm evenings, and students keep cellar bars and small clubs going past midnight at weekends, with cheap drinks.

An evening in Trieste is built around the aperitivo: spritz or local white wine around Piazza Unità, the Canal Grande and Cavana, moving out to the Barcola kiosks in summer. The population is older, and on a winter weeknight the streets are quiet by midnight. The city is better for a long dinner than a late night.

Both have wild country just behind the houses, but Sarajevo's is bigger and higher. A cable car lifts you from the Old Town onto Trebević, and Jahorina and Bjelašnica offer skiing in winter and ridge hiking and biking in summer. The trail to Lukomir above the Rakitnica canyon and rafting on the Neretva give it real mountain depth, though the paths are only lightly marked.

Trieste's outdoors is gentler and mixes land with sea. There are cliff walks on the Strada Napoleonica and the Rilke Path, the Val Rosandra gorge and the huge Grotta Gigante cave. On the water you can sail the gulf or snorkel in the Miramare marine reserve.

From Trieste, more places are within easy reach, and in more directions. In Friuli you have Aquileia's mosaic floor, star-shaped Palmanova, Cividale and the Collio wine villages. Piran and Ljubljana are across the Slovenian border, and Venice is a long but realistic day by train.

Sarajevo has one outstanding outing: Mostar's rebuilt bridge, reached by a scenic train through the Neretva gorge, with Konjic, Blagaj and Počitelj on the same route. Travnik and the Višegrad bridge are further away. Off the Mostar line the roads are slow and winding, and you usually need a car or a tour.

Trieste is the easier city with children. It is calm and safe, and the Miramare gardens, the Grotta Gigante, the waterfront aquarium, the hands-on science centre and summer days at Barcola can fill several days. It suits older children best, since the swimming is off rocks.

Sarajevo welcomes children warmly and has the Trebević cable car, carriage rides to Vrelo Bosne and a small zoo. But its main sights are about war, the hillsides are steep, and grill smoke and winter smog are hard on small lungs.

Both cities have a flat, walkable centre with steep, stepped hills behind it, and neither has a metro. Trieste's transport is the more useful to a visitor: a dense bus network reaches Barcola, Miramare and the Karst, and passenger boats cross the bay to Muggia.

Sarajevo's historic tram runs in a single line along the valley from Baščaršija to Ilidža, which is easy to understand. Away from it, the buses and minibuses are harder to follow, and you need a taxi or a tour for the Tunnel of Hope and the ski mountains. Taxis, at least, are plentiful and cheap.

Neither city is a shopping destination, and the things worth buying are different. In Sarajevo it is crafts: copper coffee sets hammered on Kazandžiluk, and kilims, leather slippers and filigree jewellery in the Bezistan and the bazaar lanes, though you need to look closely past the souvenir stock. In Trieste the best finds are antiques in the old-town lanes and things to eat and drink: coffee from local roasters, Karst wine and honey, and presnitz.

Sarajevo is by far the cheaper stay. Grilled meals, pastries and coffee cost very little, museums are cheap to enter, and comfortable guesthouses in the centre are priced well below Western Europe. Only the Old Town and the summer film festival push prices up a little.

Trieste is reasonable for northern Italy and cheaper than the famous Italian cities, and some of its best experiences, like Barcola, San Giusto and walks on the Karst, cost nothing. Seafood dinners and the better hotels still charge normal Italian city prices, and rooms get scarcer around the Barcolana regatta.

Trieste has more to book. The Teatro Verdi on the waterfront runs a full season of opera and ballet and keeps up the Habsburg love of operetta, which is rare in Italy. The Politeama Rossetti adds theatre and musicals, and in summer there are concerts in the castle courtyard on San Giusto.

Sarajevo's National Theatre also stages drama, opera and ballet, but most plays are in the local language. Its highlights are festivals: MESS for theatre in autumn and the jazz festival in November. Its most distinctive sound is sevdah, which you can hear in traditional restaurants and small clubs.

Sarajevo has thermal water, while Trieste has sea air. At Ilidža, at the end of the tram line, sulphurous springs used since Roman times feed a spa with warm pools, and the shaded streams of Vrelo Bosne are close by for a quiet walk. Winter smog in the valley takes away some of the calm.

Trieste has no thermal baths of its own, only hotel spas and a few day spas. It relaxes you through its pace instead: long sittings over a newspaper in the old coffee houses, and walks along the Molo Audace as the sun sets over the gulf.