The “Grande Raccordo Anulare” (GRA ) surrounds Rome. This imposing ring road forms a car trench separating the city from its suburbs. An informal society has formed itself around eight-lane highway where a character gallery lives under the car flow. The filmmaker moved to the GRA for a year in order to film in close proximity those who live there. 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, a botanist making audio recordings of the interiors of palm trees to detect and then poison the insects that are devouring them like a plague, a modern day cigar-smoking prince doing gymnastics on the roof of his castle, surrounded by the sea of new apartment buildings proliferating around him, a paramedic in an ambulance eternally on duty treating car accident victims along the vast road, and an eel fisherman living on a houseboat beneath an overpass along the Tiber River.