Preface The Italian Conference on Theoretical Computer Science (ICTCS) is the an- nual conference of the Italian Chapter of the European Association for Theo- retical Computer Science (IC-EATCS), The purpose of the meeting is to fos- ter the cross-fertilization of ideas stemming from different areas of theoretical computer science. In particular, ICTCS provides an ideal environment where junior researchers and PhD students can meet senior researchers. The topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following: agents, algorithms, argumentation, automata theory, complexity theory, computational logic, com- putational social choice, concurrency theory, cryptography, discrete mathemat- ics, distributed computing, dynamical systems, formal methods, game theory, graph theory, knowledge representation, languages, model checking, process al- gebras, quantum computing, rewriting systems, security and trust, semantics, specification and verification, systems biology, theorem proving, type theory. The 22nd Italian Conference on Theoretical Computer Science (ICTCS 2021) has been hosted by the University of Bologna. Due to the worldwide evolution of COVID-19, it was held online on September 13–15, 2021. ICTCS 2021 received 38 submissions (25 regular papers and 13 communications), of which 28 were accepted for presentation at the conference and then published on http://ceur- ws.org/ (18 regular papers and 10 communications). Each submission was as- sessed by at least 3 reviewers, for a total of 69 reviewers (23 program committee members plus 46 additional reviewers) producing 114 reviews overall. The au- thors of the accepted contributions mostly came from Italy (16). Foreign con- tributions came from USA (2), India (2), Japan (1), Germany (1), Switzerland (1), and Algeria (1). 4 contributions are joint work between italian and foreign authors. ICTCS 2021 was attended by 68 people. In addition to the invited talks given by Luca Padovani (University of Turin) and Nadia Pisanti (University of Pisa), the conference included the IC-EATCS annual meeting, the award ceremony for the IC-EATCS best young researcher Fabrizio Montecchiani (who gave an invited talk too), the IC-EATCS best PhD thesis by Giulia Bernardini and Francesco Dagnino, and the best MSc thesis by Linpeng Zhang. Finally, on the second day there was a panel on “Evaluation of research in theoretical computer science”, chaired by Ugo dal Lago (University of Bologna) and Angelo Montanari (University of Udine, president of IC-EATCS), with panelists Giorgio Delzanno (University of Genoa), Agostino Dovier, and Carla Piazza (both from University of Udine). The organising team was formed by Claudio Sacerdoti Coen, Gabriele Vanoni (University of Bologna), and Ivano Salvo (Sapienza University of Rome). We wish to thank the program committee members, the additional reviewers, the invited speakers, the authors, and all the participants. Special thanks go to Angelo Montanari for his suggestions during the organisation of the conference, the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bologna and the University of Bologna for the financial support. Bologna, November 2021, Claudio Sacerdoti Coen, Ivano Salvo 1