The weeks settled in their house in Tuscany provided the family with a taste of expatriate life, as they found themselves drawn into tennis parties and meals in local trattorias by somewhat avid but helpful local settlers. ‘It is not fitting’, observes Cusk, ‘not what we have come for, to wallow in the murky tank of Englishness, feeding and drifting with our own kind in their glass prison’. They are not sorry to move on, though they were fortunate to have found a house so close to Piero della Francesca’s ‘Madonna del Parto’, in its new home in the old schoolroom of Monterchi. At every stage, and particularly during the many visits to art galleries, the children appear to have been extremely forbearing.

The black and white photographs, dropped into the pages, suit the text’s measured pace. They add to the feeling that Cusk’s Italy is a pleasingly old-fashioned country, and that it is still possible to avoid the ravages of mass tourism and Berlusconi and his many hectic and appalling television channels. Dense, sometimes too dense, too richly and precisely written, The Last Supper is like a series of perfectly lit scenes in a Dutch painting, every leaf and thatched roof minutely and delicately observed.

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