Marco Visalberghi

After the India of Varanasi’s boatmen, the American desert of the dropouts, and the Mexico of the killers of drugtrade, Gianfranco Rosi has decided to tell the tale of a part of his own country, roaming and filming for over two years in a minivan on Rome’s giant ring road—the Grande Raccordo Anulare, or GRA—to discover the invisible worlds and possible futures harbored in this area of constant turmoil. Elusive characters and fleeting apparitions emerge from the background of the winding zone: a nobleman from the Piemonte region and his college student daughter sharing a one-room efficiency in a modern apartment building along the GRA.

It has been almost thirty years since Filippo Dobrilla started to sculpt a giant male nude inside a cave 650 metres deep in the Apuan Alps. This almost inaccessible place has jealously protected his secret: his youthful passion for a fellow climber, a passion Filippo was only able to indulge in here in the intimacy of this cave. Even after it was over and ever since then, Filippo has been returning regularly to the cave to work on the most important sculpture of his life, a masterpiece no one will see.

Robin is pregnant but doesn't want to be a mother. Katerina and Gaia are single but want a child. Kiki suffers from an incurable disease and wants her life to end with dignity. The procedures they hope to get access to – abortion, IVF and euthanasia – are only available and legal in other countries. Therefore, they resort to so-called medical tourism.

Barletta, Italy, 2011: one hundred years after the 1911 Fire at the Triangle factory in New York, several textile workers die because of the collapse of the building in which they used to work as employees of an unauthorized knitwear factory. Mariella Fasanella is the only survivor among the women who worked there. Through her words we experience a century-long journey through the rise and fall of manual labour and industrialism in the Western world.

On the 24th August 79 AD, the eruption of Vesuvius eradicated the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. This extraordinary film uses visual effects and archaeological findings to chronicle the last 24 hours of Pompeii. Remains of 300 citizens trapped in beach-side crypts allow scientists to reconstruct local life in the First Century after Christ. Computer graphics recreate the scale of the eruption.

Renato Nicolini is travelling along the Grande Raccordo Anulare. The traffic flows behind him like thoughts that have been triggered in a logic of free association. His story consists of memories and connections that span esoteric suggestions, city-planning considerations, and metropolitan legends.