Research investigating the factors that influence the locational choices of creative people has been extensively conducted over the last years. However, stemming from the appreciation of different contextual conditions, e.g. small- and medium-sized towns with historical cultural endowments in the form of prominent organizations, there are some unanswered questions: What is the role played by the presence of a prominent organization, whose attractive potential goes far beyond the city? Does it change over time and interact with other features of the local context? How can small cities overcome their ‘amenity shortcomings’ through leveraging on prominent and attractive organizations located in their contexts? We will try to answer these questions through a qualitative case study of a prominent performing arts organization in a small-sized town in Northern Italy. Our framework starts from the appreciation of the contributions that employing an organizational perspective (in particular, job embeddedness) could provide to so-far prevalently urban studies and economic geography-oriented studies.