Ferrari’s decision marks a departure from the festival’s history as a broad industrial showcase. By naming the event after the late surgeon Franco Mosca, who performed Italy’s first robotic surgery in 1999, the organizers have chosen to ground high technology in the physical reality of the human body. The festival is no longer a catalog of inventions, but a shared space where children in wheelchairs and their peers without impairments test new prosthetics and exoskeletons together.
The movement is toward the "età evolutiva"—the developmental age—where the rigid coldness of a laboratory is replaced by the fluidity of play. Ferrari has invited family associations to sit with university engineers, ensuring that the assistive devices on display are not merely medical tools, but instruments of socialization. In the laboratories, a child’s fingers might brush against the smooth, sensor-laden surface of a robotic limb, discovering a new range of motion in the same space where Paralympic athletes prepare for gold.
The collaboration involves the IRCCS Stella Maris, a research hospital just south of the venue, which specializes in pediatric neurology. Their researchers have developed devices such as the CareToy, an infant play gym that looks like a common nursery toy but contains thousands of sensors to measure and stimulate neurological development. These technologies are stripped of their clinical intimidating nature, presented instead as playmates.
This pivot toward the human element acknowledges that technology's highest purpose is not found in its complexity, but in its ability to restore a person to their community. When a child with motor limitations uses a robot to participate in a game of catch, the machine becomes invisible, leaving only the human connection behind.