Sacro GRA (Italian for "Holy GRA") is a 2013 Italian documentary film directed by Gianfranco Rosi. It won the Golden Lion at the 70th Venice International Film Festival. It was the first documentary film to win the award at the Venice Festival. The film depicts life along the Grande Raccordo Anulare, the ring-road highway that circles Rome. Rosi spent over two years in filming, while the editing of the film required eight months of work. According to the director, the film was inspired by Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, a novel in which the explorer Marco Polo is imagined describing his travels to the Emperor of China Kublai Khan.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; 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. Far from the iconic sites of Rome, the GRA is a repository of stories of those at the edges of the everexpanding universe of the capital city.
