By Kelli Anderson

Caffe Trieste boasts live opera and fresh-roasted coffee.

When Ed Moose moved to San Francisco in 1961 after a stint in Rome, he was drawn to North Beach because of its life, its spirit, its vita. Nearly 40 years later, he remains for the same reason. "Every 10 years or so, my wife and I say we have to move, we've been here too long," says Moose, a restaurateur who opened the Washington Square Bar and Grill in 1973 and Moose's in 1992. "But after looking at SoHo, the Village, and some other places, North Beach still looks pretty good."

North Beach still smells and tastes pretty good, too, thanks largely to the irresistible pull of Italian food from the neighborhood's delis, restaurants, bakeries, and cafés. The fading display of yellow, green, and red packaging of Italian exotica in the windows of Molinari's deli still beckons, as does the aroma of freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese from the 60-pound wheels at Florence Deli and the sweet crunch of florentines from the Danilo Bakery. In coffeehouses such as Puccini, Roma, and Trieste, you can still find people writing poetry and listening to scratchy jukebox opera.

Which is not to say Little Italy hasn't changed. The Broadway nightclubs that helped launch the careers of Barbra Streisand, Woody Allen, and Phyllis Diller, among others, are long gone, replaced by strip joints that have yet to be displaced. Beatniks and cheap rents are a thing of the past, too, and old institutions like the Square, Tony Nick's bar, and the U.S. Restaurant seem to disappear every week. But a remarkable number of old neighborhood places survive, and they do so more because of tourism than despite it.

"Tourists allow us to keep our doors open," says Mario's Bohemian Cigar Store manager Julie Crismani, whose father, Mario, added his wife's now-famous focaccia sandwiches to the menu in 1973 when rising rents inspired him to find a clientele beyond the old men who sat at his tables sipping grappa all day. According to the North Beach Chamber of Commerce, two-thirds of the neighborhood's business now comes from tourists.

Of course, tourist is a fairly broad category. You'll find throngs of people in North Beach, particularly on weekend evenings in the summer, when certain well-known restaurants like the Stinking Rose can have waits of well over an hour. But it's difficult to tell if the people clogging the sidewalks on Columbus Avenue live in Knoxville or the neighborhood.

"I'd say North Beach mostly gets regular people," says Ron Minolli, co-owner of Gino and Carlo, a 58-year-old bar on Green Street. "It's not like Fisherman's Wharf or Pier 39, where the tourist who would go to Venice just for the gondola ride would go. We get the tourist who takes the initiative to find something different."

Molinari's entices passersby with its dried salamis and other Italian treats.

Many visitors come for a sentimental journey, where the hiss of an espresso machine, the smell of freshly baked amaretti, or the lyrical rush of spoken Italian evokes a remembered Italy, or at least an imagined Italy. That North Beach doesn't necessarily evoke the real Italy will be beside the point as long as the area's vita still thrives. And until Ed Moose starts packing his bags, you can trust that it does.