The paper describes the position of Italian economy within the international scenario of production internationalisation. Trends of foreign direct investment flows in Italy are analysed both considering FDI inflows and FDI outflows. Moreover, the degree of industry passive and active multinationality of the Italian manufacturing sector is analysed. To this aim, we computed two indices by looking at the share of multinational firms’ production in Italy, using three-digit level data. The comparison between passive and active multinationality highlights the peculiar position of Italian economy characterised by a low level of active multinationality and a high level of passive multinationality in science based sectors. In specialised sectors the importance of active multinationality is, on the contrary, higher than for passive multinationality.