Romanzi e racconti. La formica argentina

An allegorical fable built on the concreteness of material data, a tale dedicated to describing the different methods tried by the inhabitants of a small seaside town to cope with an invasion of ants taking over the surrounding houses and land, La formica argentina (1952) is presented by Calvino as a story firmly anchored in reality: "The Argentine Ant is not oneiric-Kafkaesque as all the critics have always said"-he writes in fact in a letter to Goffredo Fofi-"It is the most realistic story I have written in my life; it describes with absolute certainty the situation of the invasion of Argentine ants in the crops in San Remo and a good part of the Riviera di Ponente at the time of my childhood, the 1920s and 1930s."