Chef Luciano Zazzeri of La Pineta prepares seafood in the best Italian style: simple treatments of the freshest catch available.   Where to Find It   Other recent Italy features:   The Liquid Gold Standard Origin and handling determine which Tuscan olive oils are best   Italy's White Wine Renaissance America loves Pinot Grigio but there's much more   Also:   Restaurant Awards Database Search more than 3,300 restaurants worldwide

The sea urchins had been pulled from the water overnight by one of his three fishing boats. Now Luciano Zazzeri delivers them raw-blood-red and mingled with long strands of fresh tagliolini-to a table in La Pineta, his family's tiny restaurant set directly on the Tyrrhenian Sea at Marina di Bibbona.

With an Elena Walch Kastelaz Gewürztraminer 2002 from Alto Adige providing a counterpoint, the intensity of the sea urchin gives the dish a profound complexity that belies its simple construction. Standing over the table, Zazzeri recites the complete list of ingredients: sea urchin, pasta, olive oil. With seafood so fresh, the dish requires nothing more.

Such moments typify eating seafood in Tuscany. Savvy travelers, who tend to match their eating to the finest wines a region offers, consider Tuscany a rich repository of meat and game, ideal fare for the region's Sangiovese-based Brunellos, Chiantis and Vini Nobile di Montepulciano, as well as the broad array of bold super Tuscans. They're right, but there's another Tuscany, too --its Mediterranean coastline stretching from beyond Livorno to the Lazio border some two-and-a-half hours' drive south.

Along it is served some of Italy's finest seafood, at restaurants both rustic and sophisticated: Scacciapensieri in Cecina, Romano in Viareggio, Da Antonio in the Tuscan hills and the incomparable Gambero Rosso in San Vincenzo. You'll also find some of the world's finest wines in Tuscany's fish houses, both food-friendly whites and multiple vintages of forceful reds. What you won't find is pomp or majesty, though few restaurants of quality look quite as ramshackle from the outside as La Pineta.

Situated at the end of a dirt road, where a pine grove meets the stony, dun-colored sand of the Etruscan Coast, La Pineta has hand-penned signs and advertisements for ice-cream bars. It's easy to understand why, when the manager of Sicily's Donnafugata wine estate arrived for the first time to eat the seafood he'd heard so much about, he called Zazzeri from the middle of the dirt parking lot. "Where are you?" he asked. "All I can find is this little shack."

It happens all the time. But just when it seems the directions couldn't possibly have been correct, pull open the door and find a one-room restaurant where the Zazzeris have been serving fresh fish for almost four decades. Page through the wine list, noting bargains like the Walch Gewürztraminer for $30 and the Tenuta San Guido Guado al Tasso Bianco 2002 for $20. Then there's a formidable array of Tuscan reds and blue-chip imports, including Opus One, Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and Bodegas Vega Sicilia Unico. Bite into Zazzeri's amuse bouche, a cone of pressed fish roe served with tomato, basil and a glass of Ca' del Bosco sparkling wine. Clearly, no mere fish shack was ever like this.

At Scacciapensieri, a Michelin-starred restaurant on a city street in Cecina, just up the coast from La Pineta, Aldo Buonazia sits, like a character in a bad sitcom, at a desk positioned just inside the front door, behind a sign labeled "THE BOSS." He restlessly smokes a cigarette. Then he wanders the room, peering over the shoulder of a solitary diner to see what he's reading. The restaurant's decor, an odd amalgamation of murals, artifacts, whitewashed walls and futuristic lighting, doesn't reassure.

But then the food comes, and the tide turns. A seafood salad is served warm, with a mound of tiny eels as its centerpiece and the squid cooked to a delicate firmness. The snap of fresh tomato sauce and the salty tang of the red mullet are likely to linger in a diner's memory long after the tagliolini alla triglie is consumed.

The wine service, on the other hand, sets the industry back years. The vast majority of the nearly 300 selections on Scacciapensieri's list are out of stock. Renowned names like Montevertine Le Pergole Torte, Podere La Brancaia and Biondi-Santi are enjoyable to consider, but you won't be drinking any of their wines here. That said, there were more than 100 wines from which to actually choose during a recent visit, including a strong selection of fish-friendly whites.

Scacciapensieri is a family restaurant. Buonazia's wife and daughter-in-law run the kitchen, and his cheerful son, Gianluca, helps with the front of the house. That's the template for a typical Tuscan restaurant-a mother and a father working together for decades, one in the kitchen and the other on the floor. Eventually a son or daughter is added, and perhaps an in-law. The margins on fish are low, and money is seldom available to hire managers or professional chefs. At La Pineta, for example, Zazzeri's father has recently retired, but his mother still cooks at lunchtime.

The same formula is at work at Ristorante Romano, near the top of the Tuscan coast in Viareggio, but that's about all that's typical about it. Franca Franceschini was 16 when she started cooking there almost 40 years ago; her husband, Romano, worked the front of the house. She'll still turn out a plate of lightly fried fish and calamari or a simple fillet of sea bass if required, but she has come to favor variations on such classic themes. In place of the more commonly served large calamari stuffed with vegetable puree and sliced into hefty portions, Franceschini stuffs the tiniest calamaretti, each half a mouthful.

The same calamaretti, tossed with pasta coated with sharply flavored squid ink, are featured in her sublime black tagliatelline, which may be the finest dish of seafood pasta served anywhere on the Tuscan coast.

The raw fish plates at Romano are a riot of color and intense, clean flavors, harmonizing with the minimalist decor of white walls, teak floors and track lighting, the finishing touches to a thorough renovation in 2001. And the wine list, presented in a 78-page spiral notebook, is unforgettable.

Owner Roberto Franceschini, Romano's son and an alumnus of New York's Le Cirque, has 20,000 bottles in the cellar from the more than 1,000 producers represented on his list. There are bargains and aspirational bottles at every turn, including fish-friendly Collios from Friuli-Venezia Giulia, a six-vintage vertical of Antinori's Chardonnay-based blend Cervaro della Sala and four different producers of Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand.

Or you can ignore convention and taste through the red wines of the coast, multiple vintages of super Tuscans such as Le Macchiole's Paleo, Scrio and Messorio; Tua Rita Redigaffi; Fonterutoli Siepi; Antinori Solaia; Tenuta dell'Ornellaia's Masseto and Ornellaia; and Tenuta San Guido's Sassicaia. Stemware includes Riedel, Spiegelau and other choices; there are so many different shapes of glassware available that a table ordering several bottles gradually takes on the appearance of a glass sculpture garden.

Not all of Tuscany's fish restaurants are on the water. After cooking for years on the Côte d'Azur, then serving as the Aga Khan's personal chef in Sardinia, Antonio Farina opened a restaurant specializing in fresh fish in, of all places, deepest Chianti.

Da Antonio sits on a busy road in Castelnuovo Berardenga, some three hours' drive from the best Tuscan fishing villages. Farina knows the drive in detail; he makes it six afternoons a week, just after lunch. He puts more than 100,000 miles a year on his refrigerated truck, heading to Piombino and the straits of Elba for fish, Viareggio and farther afield for crustaceans. It seems unduly labor-intensive, but Farina refuses to send an underling. "It's harder to select and buy the best fish than it is to cook it," he says.

Farina whiles away the hours between the restaurant and the coast pondering which fish he'll buy. On the way back, he plots how to prepare it. His lunches and dinners are prix fixe, the exact cost depending on the catch, and include at least one raw antipasto, four plates of hot antipasti, a spaghetti marinara or other pasta, and a piece of cooked fish. Eager to get fresh fish in meat and game country, casually dressed locals and visitors-who have included luminaries such as Woody Allen, Cindy Crawford and Oliver Stone-fill the restaurant most evenings.

Until 2000, when the restaurant changed locations in this Chianti Classico town, wine was central to the Da Antonio experience. Now the selection is haphazard. Some of the three dozen entries include vintages, but the majority do not. About two-thirds of the wines are whites priced at $60 or less.

Then there's perhaps the most famous restaurant in Tuscany, Gambero Rosso, which faces the harbor in the summer resort community of San Vincenzo. Technically, it isn't a fish restaurant at all; Fulvio Pierangelini, the owner and chef, considers meat dishes, such as ravioli of tripe, to be some of his kitchen's true gems. But the combination of seafood just off the dayboat and one of Italy's most respected cooking talents in the kitchen is enticing, and few gourmands traveling through the area can resist it. In season, the wait for one of the restaurant's half-dozen tables is usually a month.

Through the years, Pierangelini has learned to cook his fish with a restrained hand. "Twenty years ago, I'd put lobster on the same plate with lamb and foie gras," he says. "Now my cooking is about the product." One taste of his "sea bass sandwich," in which slices of raw fish are layered with fennel and black truffle and seasoned with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, and you understand the philosophy. His hand is light, almost indiscernible, yet you can't find food like this anywhere else.

Pierangelini knows how hard it is to pair wine with the wide array of seafood preparations he offers, so he has compiled a collection of half-bottles, both white and red, including five vintages of Sassicaia. In the standard 750ml format there are eight vintages of Tua Rita's Giusto di Notri, starting as low as $42, and seven of Le Macchiole's Paleo, at the same price. The Sassicaia section alone encompasses 33 entries.

A Roman, Pierangelini could have a restaurant in the capital, or wherever else he wanted, but what he loves, he says, is to look out from his dining room at "the infinity of the sea." He does it during meals, just leaves the kitchen-where he supervises every plate-for a quick glance at the water a few yards from his door. It's as though he wants to give thanks to the Mediterranean for the raw material he's in the midst of preparing with such artistry, and to reassure himself that it will always be there to give him more.