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.