This text aims at analyzing how the methodological perspective indicated by Giacomo Becattini at the end of Seventies has influenced the Italian economic history. Its innovative contribution in effect has put in crisis one of the main and more rooted interpretative paradigms of the economic history (and not only of this discipline): the existence of a single way of the industrialization process. Becattini's work has shown the close interactions that exist - inside the industrial district - between the sphere of economic production, institutions and local community.