This chapter focuses on the local social dynamics triggered by the Seveso disaster: how was the immediate town of Seveso affected in the long- term by this 1976 dioxin spill? This topic is usually overlooked in the literature devoted to the disaster, which to date has focused mostly on how this event led to stricter EU policies about environmental responsibility. Indeed, Seveso is considered a kind of symbol of European environmentalist struggle; yet for Italy's own environmental movement, this event has overtones of defeat because of the failure to match the "general stakes" of the disaster with its "local sensibility". As I aim to show here, this defeat has prompted local environmentalist strategies to change toward a "localist pathway" that sought in the 1990's to recreate, at least partially, the composition that failed at the time of the accident.