“The Garden of Forking Paths” is the title of a 1941 short story by Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges. The visual artist Mario Airò borrowed it for the collective workshop created in 2017 for Accademia dei bambini. The “master” involved children and parents in the construction of a labyrinth made of dozens of coloured threads intersecting in space. It is an amusing and playful transposition of Borges’ brilliant intuition. In his literary work he imagined the multiplication of many possible time lines converging in a single future. “La catena dei bambini veri” (The chain of real children) was the final workshop of the project “Burattini, marionette… robot e bambini veri” which explored the theme of empathy between 2016 and 2017. A series of portraits and figures of children hand in hand unrolls before our eyes. It is the simplest and truest image of the need for participation and understanding of the other.