At the moment, power systems all over the world are still facing, with new tools at disposal, old problems, made now more urgent due to the increasing amount of power transactions and to the active presence of many new operators of the electricity market. While from the technical point of view the dynamic security assessment and control tools are conceptually the same as those developed in the past, the electricity market changes the way they ought to be used and exploited as well as most of all economic conditions under which the single control actions can be adopted. The paper shows the improvement that, in the dynamic security assessment and control tools, the Italian transmission system operator has made during the last years and describes the state of the art of the practices adopted in the operational planning and in the real time operation of the Italian power system. Moreover, the paper presents the most recent arrangements made within the Italian electricity market regarding some tools and control actions that could be adopted to guarantee the dynamic security. The most important issues highlighted by the 2003 blackout from the point of view of procedures and of the legal and standard framework are also described.