Italian colonization in Porto Real (RJ), which began in 1875, resulted in the founding of a family nucleus of immigrants from northern Italy dedicated to sugar cane cultivation in the southern region of Rio de Janeiro. The creation of the Vittorio Emanuele II Association (AVE II) by the descendants in the 1990s and its inclusion in the Museo Virtuale Dell Emigrazione Emiliano-Romagnola nel Mondo (MIGRER), brought the association and, consequently, the city of Porto Real to a level of international recognition around the defense of the legacies left by emigrants from the Emilia-Romagna region. The visibility that MIGRER brings to the municipality offers a set of relationships in which the notions of networks, museums and culture come together in order to think about the phenomenon of a group s identity formation and its local belonging. The research is structured along three main lines: a review of the literature on cultural sociology; a historical contextualization of the municipality of Porto Real, with an emphasis on the Italian immigration process at local and national level, and on the role of the museum as an institution; and, finally, an analysis of MIGRER s work through associations and the concept of networks, seeking to understand local, global and virtual cultural manifestations. The study was carried out on the basis of a bibliographical survey accompanied by fieldwork, with the aim of analyzing classical and contemporary theoretical contributions in conjunction with local manifestations.