Room-temperature ionic liquids are attracting a lot of attention as potential “green” replacements for conventional organic solvents. As a new type of solvent ionic liquids must be characterized for their general physicochemical properties as well as for specific properties important for applications. In this work we have studied fundamental aspects of solute-solvent interactions in ionic liquids. Steady-state and time-resolved fluorescence spectroscopy are used to measure solvation energies and dynamics in several series of imidazolium, pyrrolidinium and ammonium ionic liquids. A combination of femtosecond Kerr-gated emission spectroscopy and picosecond time correlated single photon counting are employed to measure the full solvation response in ionic liquids. The observed solvation dynamics is highly non-exponential and extends over four decades in time. The temporal behavior of the solvation response function is compared with results from dielectric spectroscopy and molecular dynamics simulations.