Bocce—more than a game

in the North End

Artist Rhoda Ross was commissioned to do a series of watercolors of the North End for Kennedy Studios in the 1970s. She chose men playing bocce to capture the essence of the neighborhood, its traditions, and its location on the harbor front.

Courtesy of Rhoda Ross

When waves of Italian immigrants began settling in the North End in the 1880s, they brought the centuries-old game of bocce with them. Bocce provided a tangible link to their past and helped meld a community among those speaking dialects from various parts of Italy.

This park has long been home to neighborhood bocce matches. Long-time bocce player Sammy Viscione recalls, “Our fathers and grandfathers played here. We play 95 percent by the rules. We’re really here just to be together.”

When Italians began leaving the neighborhood in the 1970s, a group of boyhood chums formed the Friends of the North End to keep the camaraderie going and to meet for bocce every Sunday. Others return each year to play in the Taste of the North End Bocce Tourna-ment. Once almost exclusively a sport for Italian men, bocce now attracts players from diverse backgrounds, women as well as men, thanks to outreach by groups like Major League Bocce and Joy of Bocce.

bocce players

To play, a small ball called the pallino is tossed into a long, narrow court. Each team then throws four balls. The team with the ball closest to the pallino in the end wins the frame.

Photo by Broderick Symlie, 2008

“I’ve given bocce sets to my nieces and nephews in the suburbs so they can stay in touch with our culture.” North End native Anthony Cortese

Detail of a frieze from a 3rd century AD Roman sarcophagus shows young men playing bocce. Thought to have originated in ancient Egypt, bocce spread around the Mediterranean with the Roman legions and gave rise to local variations known as boules, pétanque and bowls. The frieze, once part of the Campana Collection in Florence, is now in the Louvre, Paris.

Commercial St Bocce Court

Men from the North End relax on a July 1970 evening watching friends play bocce before regulation-sized courts were installed in Langone Park a few years later. Indoor courts followed in 2004, attached to Steriti Rink.

Photo from the collection of Laban H. Whittaker, Jr.

Sign Location

More …

While being held at the Norfolk County Jail in Dedham, Nicola Sacco wrote a letter to a friend in Brookline in June 1927 reporting that he and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were playing bocce matches daily. It was a tangible connection to their homes in Italy.

 Two months later, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed. Their wake at the Langone Funeral Home in the North End attracted more than 10,000 mourners over two days. A crowd estimated at 200,000 turned out for their funeral procession, many of whom followed the hearse on foot to Forest Hills Cemetery. Langone Park is named for Joseph and Clementina Langone, respected civic leaders, who owned the funeral home.

Community activists. Colonial law. Political will. New state regulations. The combination created the 43-mile Boston Harborwalk–a public path, stretching from Logan Airport through seven neighborhoods to the Neponset River. In 1978, the Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management (CZM) sought to improve public access to the waterfront. They succeeded by integrating early Colonial laws into new state regulations.

In the decades that followed, community activists, city and state government, and developers of shoreline projects have worked together to ensure the Harborwalk is always constructed along the waterfront. Some sites also provide public amenities–bathrooms, meeting places, kayak launches,
etc. The result is a fabulous path welcoming residents and visitors to our vibrant clean harbor.

Early Colonial laws established public right of access along tidelands to protect citizens’ rights to fish, hunt, and navigate at sea and along the shorefront. These laws go back even further: They stem from Roman law, which was incorporated into English law and brought over to Massachusetts by English
settlers. Then, in the 1640s, Massachusetts Bay Colony passed laws permitting private docks in the intertidal area (between low and high tide) as long as public access was retained. Almost all of Boston’s waterfront is filled land that was once the intertidal area. This, together with the centuries-old legal right of access, served as the underpinnings for the 1978 CZM regulations.

Resources

  • Sammy Viscione quoted by William Giraldi. The New York Times, 19 November 2017.

Acknowledgments

  • Our gratitude to the Perkins School for the Blind and David W. Cook for their partnership in creating the audio files.
  • Thank you to the Boston Marine Society for funding the Spanish and Italian translations as well as the recording of this sign.