Recent studies about social policies have highlighted the remarkable level of innovation which has characterised the Italian public policies in this field over the past few years. In this essay we focus our attention on a crucial aspect of this great transformation: the importance that is now granted to the territorial dimen-sion of social work. We shall hereby analyse the role played by this variable, and the consequences of assuming it as a fundamental factor for the success of social intervention. The new means made available to our work are thus territorial in as much as they are related to an area which is assumed to be socially disadvantaged; such tools are not referred to a category of citizens in need, but rather to a whole territory, which is defined by a number of criteria acting as indicators of exclu-sion