Growing up, I remember all of the old Italian men in my neighborhood playing bocce ball in the courts at the park, or in homemade courts in side allies. There was no fooling around, either. These men were as serious about their bocce ball as they were their late night poker games. Now, bocce is widely known and accepted as an Italian game, but from what I discovered, Italy only borrowed.
-Mike
Here's a brief history from Bocce.org:
Throwing balls toward a target is the oldest game known to mankind. As early as 5000 B.C. the Egyptians played a form of bocce with polished rocks. Graphic representations of figures tossing a ball or polished stone have been recorded as early as 5200 B.C. While bocce today looks quite different from its early predecessors, the unbroken thread of bocce’s lineage is the consistently common objective of trying to come as close to a fixed target as possible. From this early objective, the basic rules of bocce were born. From Egypt the game made its way to Greece around 800 B.C. The Romans learned the game from the Greeks, then introduced it throughout the empire. The Roman influence in bocce is preserved in the game’s name; bocce derives from the Vulgate Latin bottia, meaning "boss."
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