Enceladus and Titan

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San Francisco’s

Little Italy well worth a look

If you want to grab a completely different take on the Golden Gate Bridge, take the coastal trail from Land’s End lookout.

If you’ve ticked off the staple headliners around the Bay City, an infatuating neighbourhood well worth an extended forage is North Beach, spilling for th with history, colour and intrigue.

It’s the Little Italy of San Fran, halfway between Fisherman’s Wharf and downtown. It’s ripe for exploration, over-run with loads of novel attractions, incredible heritage and a bohemian ethos. But its essential calling-card is the fact that generations of Italian-American family-run businesses have seeded its streets with the most fabulous suite of shops, delis, bakeries and restaurants. They also get the gold star for being so communi ty-minded.

This highly inter -connected neighbourhood will deftly mobilise residents at a time of need, whether it ’s a business that’s falling on hard times, or an appeal to the Vatican to re-open a mothballed centur y-old Catholic Church, which they successfully did.

One of the starring attractions is the City Lights Bookstore, a 70-year-old three-storeyed colos sus. The chap who helped establish it, Lawrence Ferengetti, can still be seen still wor king behind the counter at 100 years of age.

And that’s a common narrative in North Beach; age-old shops and eateries, owned and operat ed by the same family for nearly a centur y. You’ll definitely want to go to Café Trieste, where so much movie history awaits. Francis Ford Coppola wrote most of The Godfather, over several hundred cups of coffee here.

A lot of the Beat generation writers like Jack Kerouac and Allan Ginsberg would meet here. Around the corner, Café Zo etrope, owned by Ford Coppola. It’s packed with his movie memor abilia, and it’s part of the Sentinel Building, a survivor of the great quake – very much San Fran’s answer to New York’s flatiron building.

His nephew, Nicholas Cage, is often in the café chatting to patrons.

Don’t miss the century-old Victoria Pastry Company for the best canoli in town, and the cen tury-old Liguria Bakery for their focaccia-only br eads, cooked in traditional Italian wood fired ovens.

The 80-year-old Stella Pastry café does the most outrageous desserts, like their trademarked Scaripantina Cake, which is a heaped pile of custard, sponge, marsala, sherry and rum.

In a neighbourhood groan ing with aromatic delis, the old-school M olinari’s Deli is an absolute classic, with a virtual carnival atmosphere exuding from this store.

I have a major soft-spot for Italian ceramics and you will not find a better gallery of exquisite Italian ceramics than at Biordi. No matter how many times you visit San Francisco, there’s always something new to stimulate the senses, or worthy of a deeper dive, writes Mike Yardley. The old-school Molinari’s Deli is an absolute classic, with a virtual carnival atmosphere exuding from this store.