This book constitutes the refereed post proceedings of the 17th Italian Workshop on Artificial Life and Evolutionary Computation, WIVACE 2023, held in  Venice, Italy, during September 6–8, 2023.The 30 full papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 55 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: Algorithms for complex systems, Biologically inspired models, Complex chemical systems, Adaptation and swarms, Learning, Medicine and Social systems.