The Bar Cart: A Round of Bocce

As a man who bleeds Pitt Panthers blue and gold, who proudly saved his commemorative beer steins from the Steelers’ 1970s Super Bowl dynasties, and who fills out his March Madness brackets every year with eager trepidation, I’m sure it was quite a disappointment to my father to have both of his daughters basically come out of the womb with two left feet and hands.

So fearful were we of losing our precious, lens-assisted eyesight that we removed our nerd glasses to play Nerf football in the backyard. Golf lessons? The humiliation of having so little strength that the instructor swung me along with the club while demonstrating how to get out of a sand trap still brings a burning flush to my cheeks. Swimming? Never learned to dive until I was 21 years old. At least my sister had enough hand-eye coordination to play the piano.

But there was one sport that even a terribly klutzy, athletically challenged Barber girl could play.

The Italian game of bocce is almost too simple. Throw a small ball (the jack) onto the field so two teams can take turns rolling larger balls (the bocce) as close to it as possible, close enough to “kiss” with a soft clink—bocce is a homonym of baci, the Italian word for kiss. It’s the easy, breezy version of curling, for all you cool pants enthusiasts.

We don’t bother with most of the official rules—calling throws, setting exact boundaries, or marking bocce. We just throw the balls, see where they end up, and the team that gets nine points first wins. Though official games are often played on gravel, sand or clay courts, our family’s bocce tradition has always worked perfectly in our long, rectangular backyard. The slight dips, bumps and ridges beneath the grass make the game challenging even for those who’ve been playing for decades.

Though it’s hard to figure out how I’m so good at bocce when the last time I went bowling without bumpers, I bowled an eight, I partially attribute my skill to the authentic Italian bocce set passed down through the family to my all-thumbs hands. Though most modern bocce sets come in the Italian flag colors of red and green with a white jack ball, my vintage set sports the old-school red and black. The soothing weight of the bocce balls, the size that’s just right for my small paws to grip without straining, the satisfying kiss of the bocce against one another makes it a comfortable ritual rather than an athletic competition. I’m relaxed when I play, and maybe that’s why I don’t fail half as often.

Possibly the best part about bocce is because you only need one hand to throw the ball, and can use your feet to measure any disputed distances as well as nudge the bocce back to the line of play after each round, your other hand is free to hold a drink. Usually a beer bottle or wine stem gets the place of honor in our summer games. But listening to the balls clack together, so reminiscent of ice in a glass, during our most recent bocce marathons on Cape Cod inspired me to create a cocktail in honor of the game.

The following recipe blends the bitterness of the luminously red Italian liqueur Campari with an equally glowing but sweet blackberry syrup. Make extra syrup if you’ve got berries to spare; it keeps in the fridge for impromptu single-serving cocktails or as a striking mix-in for lemonade, iced tea or seltzer.

I’m not promising that it will improve your bocce game. Drinking the whole pitcher might have the opposite effect, in fact. But if you do happen to win your next informal backyard tournament thanks to this pretty red tonic, don’t forget to send a kiss my way. It’s the proper Italian thing to do.

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Tagged as: bitters, blackberry, bocce, campari, cocktail, italian