This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th Italian Workshop on Artificial Life and Evolutionary Computation, WIVACE 2022, held in Gaeta, Italy, during September 14-16, 2022. The 21 full papers and 3 short papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 45 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: answer set programming; networks and complex systems, metaheuristics, robotics, and machine learning