The paper briefly reports the history of recent meetings on Forensic Palynology in Italy (Parma, April 5-8 2006; Rome, September 11 2007). Communications presented atthe meeting of Rome are collected in this special issue of GEA. The latter includes four methodological papers and four papers dealing with palynology applied to crime cases.The meeting of Rome was opened by a video key lecture by Dallas Mildenhall who prepared for this special issue a paper on ‘Forensic palynology – an increasingly used tool in forensic science’. Experimental researches on textiles and animals as spore traps are reported. The paper on ‘Horses as spore trap’ by Marzia Boi was presented in a special session at the A.P.L.E. Symposium of Palynology 2008. Then, examples of palynology applied to kidnapping and homicide crime solving are reported by Italian teams with years of experience in this field in Italy. Finally, the case of the death of Cangrande Della Scala shows an interesting example of Forensic archaeobotany.