(Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 239 pages; $25) Reviewed by Megan Harlan San Francisco Chronicle, Copyright 2009 To leave it all behind and move to Italy: Ever since D.H. Lawrence, this alluring fantasy has inspired many a British and American writer in search of art, beauty and enlightenment -- not to mention better food. In 'The Last Supper,' Rachel Cusk -- the English author of such clever, award-winning novels as 'A Country Life' and the bracing, brainy memoir of early motherhood 'A Life's Work' -- recounts making good on the fantasy by uprooting her young family. Feeling stifled by their quiet domestic life in the upscale Bristol, England, neighborhood of Clifton, Cusk and her husband sell their house, take their daughters (ages 5 and 6) out of school, pack up the family car with games and books, and drive off to Italy for a summer season, their ultimate destination a Tuscan villa, with no plans to return to England. For American readers, comparisons to Frances Mayes' 'Under a Tuscan Sun' may leap to mind -- and will probably leap just as quickly away. While Mayes developed the mesmerizing premise that life is indeed better in a Tuscan villa of one's own, Cusk offers no such sunny aspirational portrait. Her memoir instead proves to be a charming, restless, idiosyncratic hybrid of classic family road trip and probing personal essay where the roadside attractions include Pompeii, the Basilica of Saint Francis and Etruscan tombs, and the big questions on aesthetics and truth and human nature that such sites elicit are smartly explored. The journey is also energized by Cusk's wit. Take her early forays into learning Italian from a beginner's book called 'Contatti!': Its dialogues present 'an unprogressing limbo where Tony and Mario are forever ordering the appropriate coffee for the time of day at the bar and Marcella, in her loop of eternity, stands on a street corner in Verona asking Fabrizio for directions to the railway station. People are helpful and kind in Contatti!, but they are untouched by passion or by failure: they do not scream or cry or love, or try to thwart Peter and Mary Robinson in their ambition to purchase a house in the Italian countryside.' Once the family arrives in their rented house near Arezzo -- with its view of a hilltop castle -- Cusk offers some mischievously tragic portraits of the real-life Peter and Mary Robinsons she meets. These include the Scottish taxi driver who has long made Italy his home yet is proud to speak no Italian, and, earlier on, an English couple with 'mournful faces' who've been overwhelmed by their 20-year-long renovation of a casa di campagna. Back in England, 'I became increasingly sure that to possess something was to arrest your knowledge of it, because the thing itself is no longer free,' Cusk writes. True to form, where she finds passion and transcendence is in experience. Her food writing feels fresh, not because it is exquisite, but because it's so down-to-earth: How Italian cuisine is 'first and foremost ... kind to children,' its primary colors 'red, white, and green, like the Italian flag,' the purity of the ingredients 'so psychologically relieving.' Armed with Vasari's 'Lives of Saints,' Cusk brings a similar offbeat clarity to great artworks and the places they inhabit, as when she compares the tourist crowds of Florence to an 'overgrown humanity trying to fit into the narrow, beautiful past, like a person in corpulent middle age trying to squeeze into a slender garment from their youth.' Once the family leaves Tuscany for a final month of travel, both the itinerary and the book grow more improvisatory and sensual. Most nights are spent camping out in a small borrowed tent on beaches and in roadside parks. The children (they are never named) clamor to see paintings in museums from Naples to Rome, leading Cusk to believe they have grasped the magic of art -- its ability to stop time, to present a world where 'the feeling and the reality are one.' Ultimately, Cusk decides that she does not want to settle down -- not in Italy or England -- but instead wants 'to roam,' a practically impossible dream. The final scene, which follows the family's last supper in Italy, is as eerie and marvelous as an old European fairy tale. But in it, Cusk seems to offer one solution to this desire to avoid stasis and stagnation -- the artist's solution, to keep moving by creating. 