At its best, in the hands, say, of a Robert Louis Stevenson, D.H. Lawrence, or Bruce Chatwin, travel writing embeds a perceptive, quirky observer in an unfamiliar setting and then records the fireworks. At its worst, travel lit is mere travelogue, a litany of places defined by stereotypes.

Rachel Cusk’s The Last Supper, neither the best nor the worst of this popular genre, is an account of a long summer spent in Italy with her husband and two children. As a winner of Britain’s Whitbread Award and the author of novels and a previous memoir, Cusk knows how to write vibrant prose. She also has a keen eye that notes the small yet crucial details that re-create the look of a fresco, the shimmer on water, the color of truffle paste. That’s the good news, and it may be more than enough to keep readers glued to the page.

The bad news, however, is that Cusk’s flamboyant descriptions, her semantic loop-the-loops, seem to exist independent of context, like frames that overwhelm paintings. Then, too, Cusk can be a real sourpuss, a melancholic who only occasionally seems to enjoy herself, and whose family — that anonymous trio of husband and two kids — appears behind her like a blur somewhere in the middle distance.

It’s de rigueur in books about sojourns in Italy to begin in an America or England shivering in nasty weather and then gradually to thaw as the author’s over-laden car heads south into the land of sunshine and gentle breezes. But in The Last Supper, Cusk really tears into Bristol, England, a “fume-throttled city” with a “turgid river,” where locals “found sensitivity intolerable.” Throughout, Cusk herself is sensitive all right, and annoyed at just about every turn.

Her introspection and sensitivity, however, help when she’s interacting with paintings or responding to the particular charms of Italian museums. Here her potshots at tourists, “litter and landfill sites, pylons and traffic jams,” disappears, and what takes their place are nuanced and particularized reactions, to the faces in Piero della Francesco’s fresco cycle, Cimabue’s portrait of St. Francis, the archaeological museum in Naples.

Cusk takes us from Tuscany and Umbria south to Naples and Capri, writing throughout in the present tense, which makes the journey more immediate, and in the minimalist shorthand of a Raymond Carver short story: “The fireflies scatter in drifts, like embers”; “There is a bang at the door: It is a man.” There are several nice takes on food, history and landscape, and splendid observations on artists, as when she writes of Cimabue, that “he restored to the painted human form its softness and mortality, its animal nature and the grandeur of its emotion.”

There’s a price to pay for the stunning prose and the apercus on art and life, but it’s one that many readers, I’m guessing, will gladly render.

antjlewis@yahoo.com