The purpose of the paper is to scrutinise citizen participation in co-creating a culture initiative. The active involvement of citizens in the co-creation of public initiatives has been embraced by the European Commission as a relevant topic on its reform agenda. In this line, citizen engagement has become one of the criterion to select the city to be designated as the European Capital of Culture (ECoC) of the year. However, there are still only a few systematic studies aimed at investigating the challenges, problems and difficulties associated with the processes aiming to foster citizen participation and how to make it long lasting. Hence, in this paper, focusing on Matera ECoC 2019, we aim to increase the understanding on what dynamics of participation unfold in the context of the development of an ECoC program. In particular, we address the following research questions: What are the conditions for developing a participatory process in cultural projects? Who is really involved in the decision-making process? What mechanisms are used by the official actors to foster citizen engagement? We propose an exploratory approach by adopting a case study method of analysis (Yin, 1993, 2009) of the Matera ECoC 2019. Data have been collected through both primary (interview with a key actor of the initiative) and secondary (official documents, social media, websites and press releases) sources of evidence. Generally speaking, participation involvement has been deeply scrutinised in political science and public administration literature, but how citizens become participants in a process of co-creation of culture, who benefits from this participation and why it is rarely discussed. Moreover, to our knowledge, this topic has never been investigated by scholars in the field of management and organizational studies. The present paper aims to enrich the literature on the ECoC literature by investigating the case of Matera ECoC 2019. Our study contributes to the debate on ECoC as an opportunity for economic and social development and the renewal of local communities. It can offer suggestions and insights for the EU Legislator to design new rules to make citizen participation more effective and for the regional public administration to define new cultural policies able to engage the local community.