The unique “vision of Europe” by Spike Lee opens this issue on heritage communication, in which the authoritative voice of  Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is also present. Amit Sood and Simona Panseri from the Google Cultural Institute project describe the special encounter between cultural heritage and new technologies. Yasser G. Aref illustrates the IAM project for the 3D reconstruction of ancient Alexandria. Danco Singer talks about the Encyclomedia project and Stefano Jacoviello shows the crowdsourcing platform Panspeech.