Romanzi e racconti. La speculazione edilizia

First appearing in "Botteghe Oscure" in 1957, included in an abridged version in the volume of short stories in 1958, then edited as a volume in 1963, the short novel or long story, along with the other short stories with a civil subject from the 1950s, The Argentine Ant and Smog, represents an important foray into the "difficult territory of literary realism" (Milanini, 1990, p. 68). "Usually I like to tell stories about people who succeed in what they want to do"-Calvino will say in an interview-"and usually my heroes want paradoxical things, bets with themselves, secret heroisms) not stories of failures or losses. If in A Plunge Into Real Estate I told the story of a failure (an intellectual who forces himself to be a businessman, against all his most spontaneous inclinations) I told it (tying it very much to a very specific era, to the Italy of recent years) to render the sense of an era of low moral tide."