La Strada (lit. "The Road") is a 1954 Italian drama film directed by Federico Fellini from his own screenplay co-written with Tullio Pinelli and Ennio Flaiano. The film portrays a naive young woman (Giulietta Masina) bought from her mother by a brutish strongman (Anthony Quinn) who takes her with him on the road. Fellini has called La Strada "a complete catalogue of my entire mythological world, a dangerous representation of my identity that was undertaken with no precedent whatsoever."

In later years, Fellini explained that from "a sentimental point of view," he was "most attached" to La Strada: "Above all, because I feel that it is my most representative film, the one that is the most autobiographical; for both personal and sentimental reasons, because it is the film that I had the greatest trouble in realizing and that gave me the most difficulty when it came time to find a producer." Of all the imaginary beings he had brought to the screen, Fellini felt closest to the three principals of La Strada, "especially Zampano." Anthony Quinn found working for Fellini invaluable: "He drove me mercilessly, making me do scene after scene over and over again until he got what he wanted. I learned more about film acting in three months with Fellini than I'd learned in all the movies I'd made before then." Long afterwards, in 1990, Quinn sent a note to the director and his co-star: "The two of you are the highest point in my life -- Antonio."  Critic Roger Ebert, in his book The Great Movies, has described the current critical consensus as holding that La Strada was the high point of Fellini's career and that, after this film, "his work ran wild through the jungles of Freudian, Christian, sexual and autobiographical excess". (Ebert, himself, disagrees, seeing La Strada as "part of a process of discovery that led to the masterpieces La Dolce Vita (1960), 8 1/2 (1963) and Amarcord (1974)".)  The years since its initial release have solidified the high estimation of La Strada. It holds a 97% rating on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes from 31 reviewers who, on average, scored it 8.7 on a scale of 10. Its numerous appearances on lists of best films include the 1992 Directors' poll of the British Film Institute (4th best), the New York Times "Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made", and the "Greatest Films" list of They Shoot Pictures, Don't They (# 67) - a website that statistically calculates the most well-received movies.  In 1995, the Catholic Church's Pontifical Commission for Social Communications issued a list of 45 films representing a "...cross section of outstanding films, chosen by a committee of twelve international movie scholars." This has come to be known as the Vatican film list, and includes La Strada as one of 15 films in the sub-category labeled Art. Pope Francis, has said it is "the movie that perhaps I loved the most," because of his personal identification with its implicit reference to his namesake, Francis of Assisi. Answer this question using a quote from the following article:

Who were some of the characters in La Strada ?
Anthony Quinn found working for Fellini invaluable: "He drove me mercilessly, making me do scene after scene over and over again until he got what he wanted.