2013 marked twenty years since the publication of Edward W. Said’s seminal volume *Culture and Imperialism*. The collection of essays in the special issue of the journal “Le Simplegadi” (XII, 12) engages with *Culture and Imperialism* not only to pay homage to the author of a book that has been central to the way we read literature and study culture, but also to discuss local uses and revisions of Said’s work for contemporary time in Italy and Europe; they investigate a number of geo-political spaces that a Saidean perspective has opened up globally or transculturally, and look at how we can now draw a new cartography, unstable and dynamic, of the planet.