Maker Faire Rome – The European Edition returns for its 14th edition from 23 to 25 October 2026, filling the Gazometro Ostiense with more than 400 exhibition stands. Organised by the Rome Chamber of Commerce, it is the largest Maker Faire in Europe, and tickets are sold exclusively online.
This year’s participation numbers: 26 secondary schools and 27 universities and research centres, bringing 145 projects between them. Part of the programme again runs at the nearby Istituto Superiore Antincendi.
Three areas, one organising principle
The programme is built around Innovation, Creativity and Discovery, but the thread running through all three days is practical experience rather than presentation. Working prototypes you can test, the people who built them standing next to them, hands-on workshops, and research visibly moving out of the laboratory.
The subject spread is wide: robotics and artificial intelligence feature heavily, alongside digital manufacturing, circular economy, agritech, aerospace, design, education and new forms of creative production. New programme strands this year extend into robotics, craft, books, food and design.
Humanoid robots, playing football, unsupervised
The biggest addition for 2026 is Italy’s first International Italian Open RoboCup Humanoid Soccer tournament.
Teams from universities and research centres compete with five humanoid robots on each side. The detail that makes it worth seeing in person: once a match begins, the machines play autonomously — reading the pitch and making their own decisions, with no human control.
That constraint is the point of RoboCup and always has been. A teleoperated robot playing football is a demonstration of a radio link. An autonomous one has to solve perception, localisation, balance, path planning and multi-agent coordination simultaneously, in an adversarial environment, in real time, while staying upright. The games look ungainly for reasons that are genuinely hard.
SPQR, and the Beijing result
Among the competing teams is SPQR from Sapienza University of Rome.
Their recent form is not modest. In August, SPQR reached the final of the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, and were the only non-Chinese team still in contention during the final three days of the competition.
The team belongs to Sapienza’s Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering, has competed in RoboCup since 1998, and is led by engineer and researcher Vincenzo Suriani. Nearly three decades of continuous participation in the same competition is its own kind of achievement — RoboCup teams are built from graduate students, which means the institutional knowledge has to survive complete turnover of personnel every few years.
Why this one is worth the trip
Maker Faire Rome has a different character from the consumer-electronics calendar. The exhibitors are schools, university labs, start-ups and individual makers rather than brands with booth budgets, and the Gazometro — a decommissioned gasworks — gives it an industrial setting that suits the content.
For anyone whose interest is in where creative technology comes from rather than what it costs at retail, a hall containing 145 student and research projects is a more informative three days than most trade shows.