The articles in this issue originated as papers at the conference ‘Italy in the Digital Era: Mapping the New Media System’, which we organized on behalf of the UCL Centre for Italian Studies at the Institute of Romance Studies (IRS), University of London, on 13–14 October 2000. We are grateful to our sponsors, Fiat, to Nicolette David and Sarah Wykes at the IRS for their organizational support, to the editorial board of Modern Italy for agreeing to our proposal to publish these articles as a special issue and to our referees for their comments and suggestions.