In one of his 1948 articles, Carlo Cassola had compared Grosseto to Kansas City: or rather, the comparison was attributed to an American serviceman who had passed through the Tuscan town during the war and noted the similarities between the two cities, modern cities at the center of a large and fertile land. “Our city,” Luciano Bianciardi would later write. "was beautiful like that and they had to let it stay, and live, and grow with its genuine character, a city of dirt roads, of open spaces, to the wind and outsiders, like Kansas City.“

The idea of Grosseto as a kind of literary ”Kansas City,“ a modern and dynamic place, then faded with time, replaced, in Bianciardi’s literature, by the realization that both the province and the big city had their limits and failed to meet his aspirations, so much so that later, in 1964, Bianciardi would write his short film ”Farewell to Kansas City," to salute the end of that myth.