IN THE END…

Could bocce, in a future joint candidacy of countries belonging to the Mediterranean area, be a nominee for inscription on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity? It definitely has potential. Safeguarding measures taken to preserve this cultural heritage would certainly involve working with young people, i.e. promoting and maintaining the tradition. These efforts are made, and are more or less successful, in bocce clubs, while the traditional bocce is slowly losing the battle with new technologies and lifestyles: many interviewees point out that young people today are not interested in bocce, and that the main participants are members of the older generation. Sandro Gulja, in his book Boćanje – igra znanja i vještine (Bocce – A Game of Competence and Skill) has succinctly summarised the potential of bocce: “It is never too early to start playing and it is never too late to stop. Bocce is learned and played throughout the whole life.”

Motivation is certainly essential for maintaining any tradition, bocce included. There are frequent examples of families whose members of different generations, for instance a grandmother and granddaughter, play bocce, as well as both spouses. Similarly, it was interesting to see a father and daughter receive a bocce coaching certificate at the ceremony that took place while we were putting on this exhibition. Such family traditions are important for the survival of bocce, and some interviewees even emphasise the impact of genetics in successes of today’s younger generations. An important factor is definitely the environment in which we live, and, in this regard, an interviewee from Mali Lošinj has said: “As a kid, I used to look at those old bocce balls; when we were kids, we would play them, fool about… I was good at it, that’s how it started.” An interviewee from Brod Moravice, who is a member of a bocce club today, started to play at the age of 14 or 15, watching adults, in order to pass the time before going to the cinema: “We started gathering spontaneously behind the Culture Hall on Sundays and play with wooden balls, with no strict rules, in an amateur way. Then a tournament was organised on the Municipality Day, and that’s how it started.”

Aware of the times and circumstances in which we live, we have to ask ourselves: When did we start preferring to spend our free time with a modern technological gadget? When did our work commitments become pressing to such an extent that we give them priority over our own free time, over spending time with people who are dear to us, with acquaintances, out in the open? When did the word leisure, a relaxed way of spending one’s free time, start to slowly disappear from our vocabularies, to be replaced by various imperatives we cannot say no to? Looking back at my childhood in the late 1970s, I remember meeting my friends without explicit arrangements, without the need to fix the time and place, because when we arrived at our usual place, there was always someone dear to us there. Ready to play and spend time with us.

Bocce court was then, and today still is, one of such places. However, it can serve as an indicator of social changes. There are fewer and fewer courts that are not part of a club, where you can find a group of bocce enthusiasts, and there are more and more of those overgrown with grass, where you can only guess their shape. The real reason for such gatherings is always spending time with other people, and one of our interviewees, somewhat nostalgically, said: “The jog is the last oasis of the old way of life.”

In the end, let us look at bocce as a refuge from the virtual world surrounding us at all times, both in the workplace and in our free time. Many books and articles point out the benefits of spending time outdoors, in the countryside, while being physically active, so let us try and choose to spend some time in the open air and get some active rest instead of using technology. Let us spend this time playing bocce. Because, as one of my colleagues said, “bocce is not difficult; anybody can play it, and it’s so much fun.”