By Paul Reidinger

ALTHOUGH I'VE BEEN , for most of my adult life, a Francophile – an admirer of France's miraculous blend of northern precision and Mediterranean joie de vivre – I do understand the attractions of Italy. While the French make incomparable food and wine and are intense kissers, the Italians (also makers of incomparable food and wine, also intense kissers) seem more fun, on the whole. They live in what appears to be (certainly to the Anglo-Saxon eye) joyous chaos, and if the train is late or the cabbie doesn't show, who cares, another will be along at some point, have some more vino.

You sense some of this distinction in our very own restaurants. Whisper "trattoria" in a group of people, and you can almost see them start to relax. The word conjures memories or hopes of those uncomplicated Italian dishes and deliciously unsnobby wines everybody loves and nobody gets nervous about ordering. "Bistro," on the other hand, sends most of us a rung or two up the anxiety ladder, for even the most casual of bistros is French, or nominally French, and everyone has heard, at one time or another, some blood-curdling tale of French scathingness.

Of course, much of this is myth, but humankind is governed by myth. And the French do seem to be, however faintly, more formal than their Italian cousins. Perhaps it is a distinction mutually agreed on by two civilizations with far more in common than not as a way of maintaining their separate identities. For our purposes the important fact is that the neighborhood trattoria is far more plentiful than the neighborhood bistro in this city, and that's only partly because of greater Italian immigration. It's also because when you want to go out to eat in your neighborhood, you don't want to fuss or have heart palpitations.

If your neighborhood is anywhere near Geary Boulevard between Third and Fifth Avenues, you might have to fuss just a bit about which trattoria to choose, because there are two pretty good ones within two blocks of each other: the long-running Café Riggio and the six-year-old Bella. Of the two, Bella is more the looker inside, with its café au lait color scheme under high ceilings, matching drapes arranged voluptuously around the windows, and near the front, large painting of always romantic Venice.

The food is quite as good as what you would be served in a comparable trattoria in Italy. Being in an unfussy frame of mind, we opened with a mixed antipasti plate ($9), a usual-suspects array of grilled zucchini, peppers, and eggplant, with slices of salami, chunks of soft, housemade mozzarella cheese, olives, marinated calamari (a nice touch), and sliced artichoke hearts.

For some reason my companion – perhaps because he was in a deeper sampler mood than I suspected – wanted (and got) the assaggini di Bella ($10.95), a nice but not particularly distinguished jumble of cheese ravioli in cream sauce, cheese gnocchi in tomato sauce, and rigatoni in pink sauce. It was the kind of thing the unwary traveler might be served in one of those trattorias in Florence that tout, ominously, their "tourist" menus.

Spaghetti norcina ($12.95), on the other hand, rather gorgeously combined Italian sausage and porcini mushrooms in a porcini cream sauce. I could practically hear a fire crackling in the hearth (though there is no hearth) and the rains of autumn pattering against the tall windows (though there was no rain). Our dabbling in dessert, with a round ricotta cheesecake topped with sour-cherry compote ($6), only amplified the theme of fortification.

Still, there is something summery about Bella's feel, just as there's something appealingly snug about Riggio's, whose abundance of golden paneling and well-scuffed plank floors radiate both a sheltering warmth and a sense of having been lived in that seems authentically Italian. The food is quite similar to Bella's, and similarly priced. One embarrassing bomb: minestrone ($2.75 a cup), made bitter by too much celery. A much better opener is the genuinely exquisite formaggio all' argintera ($6), cubes of caciocavallo cheese sizzling in a cast-iron skillet amid a sauce of olive oil, vinegar, red wine, garlic, and thyme. The dish is something like a cross between fondue and saganaki.

We liked vongole alla Fiorentina ($17) – steamed baby clams Florentine-style, with tomato, onions, garlic broth, basil, and lemon butter over spaghetti – having been steered there by our server, who assured us it was better than linguine con vongole. It did need salt.

The seafood cannoli ($14.50), by contrast, did not need salt or indeed any other added seasoning: it beautifully balanced the innate sweetness of bay scallops, shrimp, and crab (stuffed like grapeshot into two hefty pasta tubes) with a white-wine cream sauce lightly perfumed by nutmeg and given a savory grace note by a layer of caramelized cheese. If the dish had a fault, it was that it was several whiter shades of pale: pale cannoli, pale sauce, pale filling (except for the earth tones of some mushroom slices). A sprig or two of parsley, a dab of rouille, would have considerably brightened things up – made the dish a bit more bella, if you see what I mean.