Summary - In the first part of the essay the a. examines the paradigm of the political culture, meant both as an analytical approach to political phenomena, and as a definition of an object of study. He acknowledges the debt that political science owes to the "discovery" of political culture by Gabriel Almond, but he points out the limits of his analysis.

Political culture, in other words, is not only made up of opinions, attitudes and tendencies, but also of ideas and values, of symbols and norms, myths and rituals, behaviours and structures. Political culture is a form of collective conscience which develops through historical experiences and within a territory. Collective historical experiences and territorial space are particularly important to local political cultures which show a great capacity of survival in many European systems including the Italian.

In the second part the a. explains methodologies and results of two research works on two zones of central Tuscany, characterized by the so-called "red subculture".

The first research - a content analysis of a socialist weekly of Valdelsa in the fifteen years period between the last two centuries - tries to identify the messages and values spread by that newspaper in the zone under its influence. Those messages and values, which were not limited to the strictly political sphere, can be regarded as constitutive of the local political culture of a red zone in its stage of foundation.