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.

La Strada is structurally, and titularly, a road film; “la strada” literally means “the road” in Italian.

La strada, film score by Italian composer Nino Rota for the 1954 film of the same name by Federico Fellini. Rota's music was one of the relatively rare European film scores to attract wide attention in the United States as well.

As film scholar Mark Shiel has pointed out, when it won the first Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1957, La Strada became the first film to win international success as an example of a new brand of neorealism, "bittersweet and self-conscious".