This paper aims to analyze the growth of video surveillance in Italy through a focus on the legislative framework and the politics, in particular urban security policies. The paper explores whether the decentralization of security polices has impacted on the implementation of surveillance cameras within national urban contexts. A specific emphasis will also be given to the limited empirical data available, namely a qualitative research carried out in the city of Milan in 2005 [4]. Efforts are made to understand potential discrepancies between the national Data Protection Authority provisions on video surveillance and the reception of it by the camera operators. This contribution also seeks to shed light on “lost surveillance studies” [15] within a non-Anglophone framework in order to sketch out an approach to surveillance that differs from countries where the issue has been broadly explored (inter alia [21]).