Brussels
You can be here in October for about €694, 4 days, direct.
Why now
Good time in October: 16°C days, 14 rainy days, fares below average.
This is a business city, so hotel rates fall at weekends and in August when the institutions empty and the streets go quiet. The winter market fills the centre for a month around Christmas, and the flower carpet on the Grand-Place appears only every second summer.
Best months here: May, June, September. October is not one of them — the label above measures the month against a fixed bar, not against the rest of the year here. Daytime highs, sea temperature and rainy days from three years of Open-Meteo reanalysis; a rainy day is one with at least 1 mm of rain, which is the WMO threshold and not the same as "it drizzled".
The place
Brussels is a bilingual capital that has never bothered to look like one: a gilded square, then blocks of Art Nouveau townhouses, 1960s office slabs, Congolese and Moroccan cafés and the glass of the European quarter, all within a tram ride. It is a city for eating and drinking rather than looking, and the beer, chocolate and frites are as good as advertised. It suits people who like a shabby, grown-up place with no skyline to photograph.
What you can do
- 01See the Grand-Place lit at night, then again at eight in the morning when the guild houses have the square to themselves.
- 02Tour Victor Horta's house and studio in Saint-Gilles, then walk the Art Nouveau facades along rue Defacqz and avenue Louise.
- 03Taste lambic and gueuze at the Cantillon brewery in Anderlecht, where the beer still ferments in open copper vessels.
- 04Spend a morning on the Mont des Arts: the Bruegel rooms of the Old Masters, then the Magritte Museum next door.
- 05Rummage at the Jeu de Balle flea market before ten, then eat croquettes aux crevettes in a Marolles café.
Where to stay · neighbourhoods
Stay in Saint-Gilles or Ixelles for a real neighbourhood, or around Sainte-Catherine for a short central visit. Avoid the streets around Gare du Midi and Gare du Nord at night, and the European quarter at weekends, when it is closed.
Unusual things
- ◦The Musée Wiertz, the painter's own studio near the European Parliament, kept as a free museum of enormous, macabre nineteenth-century canvases.
- ◦Coudenberg, the excavated cellars and streets of the old ducal palace buried beneath Place Royale, entered through the BELvue museum.
- ◦The Sewer Museum at Porte d'Anderlecht, where a stretch of the covered river Senne can be walked underground.
Day trips
Flight options
Routes come from OpenFlights (historical) and a 2026 route reference compiled from public timetables. Durations are the published schedule where we have it, otherwise a block-time model fitted on measured nonstop flights. Verify schedules with the airline before booking.
Flight.Deals has not measured this route from Bologna yet, but it does measure Brussels from Milan (€73 typical) and Rome (€86 typical).
Entry requirements · IT passport
Source: passport-index-data, March 2026 (coarse indicator), covering 258 of our 268 destinations for each of 199 passports. Always confirm with the destination's official site.
Airports
Distances are centre to airport derived · nonstop counts are our route reference for 2026, not every flight that exists.
Local transport
- Airport to city
- Train, 20 min, €10; Charleroi bus, 60 min, €18
- Car needed?
- No — walkable or good public transport
- Getting around
- The old centre is walkable and the STIB metro and trams reach the communes beyond it with a contactless card. Brussels Airport is about 20 minutes from Central by train, several times an hour; Charleroi is a separate airport about an hour away by shuttle bus.
- Clock
- Same time as Bologna (Europe/Brussels) derived
- Daylight
- 10.8 hours of daylight in October · sunrise 08:04, sunset 18:53 derived
- Currency
- EUR
Good to know
Pickpocketing is common on the metro and around the three main stations, and the area around Gare du Midi is unpleasant late at night.
Alternatives at a similar price
Whole trip per person for 4 days from Bologna in October, then the flight time; estimates, like the total above.
Athens
Lampedusa
Kos
Malta
Rhodes
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