In La Strada the road ends at the water, the place where the road began. Gelsomina is no longer with Zampanò. He has lost her like he lost Rosa. No other human beside him, he is alone with the sound of the waves licking at the shore.

Gelsomina, an apparently somewhat simple-minded, dreamy young woman, learns that her sister Rosa has died after going on the road with the strongman Zampanò. Now the man has returned a year later to ask her mother if Gelsomina will take Rosa's place.

It's the cardinal work of his career, the turning point from his Italian neorealist roots to the florid imagery and surreal narrative style that has come to be known as "Felliniesque." For skeptics who deplore the self-indulgence and grotesquerie of his later films, La Strada is the career high point preceding his ...

Nearly 40 years after the film was made, the parable of redemption hidden beneath an apparently picaresque plot had become even more compelling and lyrical.” “La Strada is the movie that perhaps I loved the most.” “The theme for Fellini's spiritual fable is that everyone has a purpose in the universe.