This is the first issue of Modern Italy to focus on disability. We want to thank the general editors of the journal, Philip Cooke and John Foot, for having welcomed our proposal for it. The original nucleus was the panel ‘Disabilities' at the conference ‘Language, Space and Otherness in Italy since 1860’, which David Forgacs organised at the British School at Rome on 24-25 June 2010. The decision to include a panel on that topic was influenced, in turn, by Rachele Tardi's experience in 2009–2010 of managing a project in Ethiopia, funded by the Italian Foreign Ministry, for the NGO Comitato Collaborazione Medica, which worked with local partners on community-based rehabilitation (CBR) of people with disabilities. Our discussions of CBR at that time stimulated our interest in looking more closely at the contemporary situation of disability rights in Italy. Our main objective in editing this issue has been to offer readers a representative sample of writing both by Italian disability activists and researchers and by non-Italian scholars working on Italian disability issues. We deliberately sought a mix of academic writing and writing by people actively engaged in work for disability rights. Giampiero Griffo, who was the discussant at the conference panel and is one of the authors included here, was a willing mediator for other articles, and we would like to thank him for his support and help in making this issue happen. We also thank Franco Baldasso for his hard work assisting the editorial process, our peer reviewers for their invaluable input, and our translators, Bryan Brazeau, Kristin Szostek Chertoff, Brian DeGrazia and Stuart Oglethorpe. We should also like to thank Pier Vittorio Barbieri, Claudia Bertolè, Flavia Monceri and Antonio Pascale.