Foreigners in the Family : NONFICTION : AN ITALIAN EDUCATION, <i> By Tim Parks (Grove/Atlantic: $22; 338 pp.)</i>

In his first book of nonfiction, “Italian Neighbors,” the British novelist Tim Parks chronicled his initiation into the Veneto, exploring the lives of a people less celebrated in literature than Tuscans--and no less eccentric. A signal event for this expatriate was the birth of his first child, and in “An Italian Education,” the delightful sequel to “Italian Neighbors,” Parks uses his children’s upbringing as a way to “understand how it happens that an Italian becomes an Italian, how it turns out (as years later now it has turned out) that my own children are foreigners.”

“An Italian Education” opens during summer vacation along the Adriatic Sea, when Parks and Rita, his Italian-born wife, learn they have set out on what her family and other Italians can only view as an exercise in folly: the birth of a second child. Parks thus leads us through childbirth and house hunting, encounters with insurance agents and schoolteachers, adventures in school and in the countryside, all with an air of amusement and an eye for the details that shed light on a society.

“I can’t help thinking that while the trend away from formal discipline is clearly general across the Western World,” he writes after watching a little girl misbehave in a pediatrician’s waiting room, “no people is perhaps as perplexed as the Italians with the whole problem of how to make a child do what it does not want to do. Perhaps because Italian parents so rarely find any good reasons for not doing what they want to do.” This may, in fact, explain why celebrations go on long after their original motives--religious or otherwise--have been forgotten. And why the national debt is so high.

Parks weighs his family’s experiences in Montecchio, a village near Verona, in a series of chapters titled after Italian words and phrases. It is as if language itself holds the key to his discovery of where “Italianness might lie.” His meditation on what he calls a “triumphantly Italian expression”--tengo famiglia--is a fine example of his gift for explaining certain dynamics of Italian life through sayings his neighbors take for granted. The literal translation--”I support a family”--does not begin to cover all the meanings of the expression, which also carries with it suggestions of sacrifice, power and social duty. “So that if anyone ever asks you what you have achieved in life,” he declares, you need say no more than tengo famiglia to be beyond any possible reproach, and when the judge is about to pass sentence on you for theft or political corruption, your lawyer will always plead, “But your honor, my client tiene famiglia!” He supports a family. And this both excuses him for what he stole (he stole it for his family!) and makes it more difficult to put him in jail (what would become of his children?).

His is, indeed, a sharp wit, which keeps him honest, entertaining and precise in his judgments--of himself as well as of his foreign neighbors, friends and family.

“An Italian Education” ends as it began, by the Adriatic. Seven years after the impending arrival of Stefi brought cries of folly (postponing the writing of Parks’ book), Rita is back in Montecchio, pregnant with a third child (“Madness,” says her father), and Parks is left to care for the children. Michele and Stefi are decidedly Italian, he knows that now, and the sight of clowning teenagers prompts him to remark that “one of the reasons I’ve stayed in Italy is that I believe, perhaps erroneously, perhaps sentimentally, perhaps merely in reaction to my own childhood of church bells and rainy weekends--I do believe that kids have a better time here, that adolescence is more fun here.”

His idea acquires a certain gravity, though, in the person of his father-in-law, a corpulent man with a penchant for starting projects and never finishing them. (The vacation house in Pescara, for example, which still lacks its third floor and slanting roof, reminds Parks “of a bunker for some forgotten conflict, or for an overspill of unwanted refugees.”) Beset by his children’s endless demands (money, apartments), the sacrifices he will nevertheless make for them until he dies, it is fitting that Nonno--as Michele and Stefi, his grandchildren, call him--be given the last word. “No better place to grow up than Italy,” Parks teases him.

“Spooning foam into his mouth like a big baby, the crumbs of a second brioche on his lips, my father-in-law is quick to correct me: ‘No better place,’ he says, ‘not to grow up!’ ”

The author of seven novels, including “Goodness” and “Shear,” Parks supports himself by teaching at the University of Verona and by translating the works of Italo Calvino, Roberto Calasso and Alberto Moravia. Which is to say, he writes about Italy from the privileged position of an extraordinarily well-informed outsider. His appreciation for the customs and rituals central to a country at once determined to leave its peasant past behind and dedicated to many of those same ancient values takes on new meaning when it comes to his reflections on child-rearing. Suspicious of travel books, in “An Italian Education” Parks has created instead a small masterpiece in the tradition of expatriate literature, the kind of work that depends on long and loving involvement with a place. We are fortunate that he has made such an investment.