While researching for a book on mass tourism, a writer named Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer suffers a painful breakup and decides to leave everything behind to put his memories in order. The place he chooses for his retirement is the Grand Hotel Europa, an establishment with an illustrious past and uncertain future inhabited by a cast of bizarre characters. The author sets himself the task of reconstructing in writing his explosive relationship with Clío, an Italian art historian with a bold theory about Caravaggio's last painting, and as he progresses in his task his fascination with the mysteries of the hotel increases. His conversations with the other guests, meanwhile, lead him to reflect on the decline of the Old Continent. Grand Hotel Europa is a monumental novel that dialogues sotto voce with great European thinkers and writers, from Virgil, Horace and Seneca, through Dante, to Thomas Mann and George Steiner.