We follow retired Professor Anders Croft through the streets of Italy's Florence on the last day of the old Dante scholar's life. Weeks earlier, Anders' stepdaughter, Anna, had shown up at his Arizona casita, where he had settled to spend his last days sipping whiskey. She is there to demand an explanation for his behavior over the years, including his part in the death of her mother decades earlier. His refuge upended, he flees her to Florence, a city of many memories. The Hotel Lilia's concierge, an old acquaintance named Sebastiano, agrees to accompany Croft through the city. Remembering the professor's weakness for women, the concierge offers to introduce him to a certain lovely lady. But Sebastiano has an agenda, wronged as he was by Croft many years earlier. The concierge gradually reminds Croft of events he would prefer to forget, including the circumstances of the death of his wife, Kate, killed on the Autostrada del Sole with Croft at the wheel. The professor had been in the midst of a torrid affair with a young Italian girl named Diana when his Kate died in the terrible accident. It is to a Florentine Contessa that the concierge eventually introduces Anders, a woman with a long memory and a fierce agenda of her own. She has a staggering surprise for the professor, and it is at that point that the old scholar's world begins to fall apart, the past becoming more real to Anders than the present ever could.