How do the actors of a given epoch perceive relationships between legal cultures within a process of normative production? How can we historiographically categorize these relationships? The process of Brazilian penal codification between 1928 and 1940 is very rich for asking these questions, above all because it was a region considered to be peripheral, because of the political transformations of the period in Brazil (a coup in 1930 and a self-coup that established a dictatorship in 1937) and because of the circulation of two legal texts from Italy, the Ferri project of 1921 and the Rocco Code of 1930. So, with the relations between Italy and Brazil in mind, this article proposes: i) that the discourses on import or export are factors in legitimizing normative production, the former more linked to Brazil and the latter to Italy; ii) that foreign codes can be classified in terms of their prestige and use in a given legal culture (models, anti-models or examples), with the Ferri project tending to be characterized by Brazilian jurists as an anti-model and the Rocco Code as a model (albeit a very controversial one because of Fascism).