A little body English for an Italian sport

Joe Santoro has never met Mario Pagnoni, but they have at least two things in common: their Italian heritage and love for the game of boccie.

In Tewksbury, Santoro is leading a group of noncompetitive players at the Tewksbury Senior Center on Wednesday mornings throughout the summer. Pagnoni coordinates a league of serious players who meet Mondays in North Andover.

It's Italians like Santoro and Pagnoni who are the driving force behind the game in this region. But with their leadership, a whole new generation from varied ethnic backgrounds is playing.

The author of the ''Joy of Bocce," (there are various English spellings of the word) a print-on-demand book available through his joyofbocce.com website, Pagnoni is dedicated to writing about the game, producing a weekly e-zine he e-mails to players around the country.

''It is growing," said Pagnoni, 57, a retired Methuen teacher who now runs a nonprofit organzation that offers sporting events for older athletes. ''There's pockets of frenzied activity around the country. It's huge in California, big in Chicago and Florida, wherever there [are] a lot of retirement areas and wherever you can play outdoors year round. Then there are pockets, Memphis, Philly, Jersey. Baltimore has pretty cool boccie in the Italian section."

But he laments the scarcity of players in the Boston area.

''There's not a lot around here," he said. ''The problem is we need to get courts out of the private and into the public parks, and we need to get TV exposure."

Still, there are more than even Pagnoni realizes.

Santoro, 79, has been teaching and playing boccie for years in Tewksbury. Armand Buonanno, president of the Sons of Italy Lodge in Lawrence, said they will have the grand opening of their two new indoor courts next month. He said he was aware of boccie players in Fitchburg, Watertown, and Everett.

It's one of the oldest games known to mankind, and the early Romans played it with coconuts from Africa. But it didn't reach the United States until the first wave of Italians immigrated here in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, bringing their traditions.

The game is deceptive in its simplicity. Two teams of two or four players roll balls toward a lemon-sized yellow ball called the pallino. Differentiating the teams are four grapefruit-sized balls of one color and four of another. Someone rolls the pallino past a midpoint of the court, and the players roll the larger balls toward it, aiming to be the closest.

At the end of each round, teams get points, depending on how close their balls got to the marker ball. Teams typically play to 11 or 21 points.

While the game can be played on a lawn, serious players prefer a court defined by 60-foot-long end boards, though private courts can vary from 30 to 70 feet long. Typically lining outdoor courts is the traditional stone dust, used for its ease of smoothing and leveling with a rake, though clay, crushed oyster shell, or artificial turf is sometimes used.

For many years, boccie was a game for men. According to Santoro, who recalls watching his grandfather play on a farm in Revere with other Italian immigrants, the language was colorful and a glass of wine the reward for winning.

''They used to play it under the grapevines," he said, standing in his backyard on a warm July day, beside the 60-foot-long boccie court he built about 15 years ago. ''I was only 12 years old at the time. They used to play for wine."

Last week, Santoro was supervising a group of elderly Tewksbury residents through a gentle game in the summer heat.

Playing with Lois Landry, 65, Terry Harrington, 80, and Joyce Corcoran, 72, was Bill DiGregorio, 88, who grew up in Everett and recalls heading to Somerville to play when he was a boy. Somerville is also where Santoro, a retired toolmaker for General Electric in Lynn, grew up with his sister and parents.

''We used to play for beer and tripe. A lot of old-timers used to play," said DiGregorio, a retired firefighter. Then placing one black walking shoe in front of the other, he added, ''My father used to measure like this."

Santoro's method of measuring is only slightly more sophisticated. On the court's bumper is a yellowed, plastic cup with a frayed string coming out of a hole in the bottom. The cup's opening is just large enough to fit over the pallino, and the string about 4 feet long. Santoro uses the gizmo, which he put together years ago, to measure the distance between the pallino and the balls that are rolled toward it.

In the Boston area, the outdoor boccie courts in the North End are filled with players on most summer nights.

FIERI-Boston, a nonprofit organization of young Italians, Italian-Americans, and Italophiles ages 18 to 39, will hold a North End Bocce Night on Aug. 26 at 5 p.m. at Boston's Commercial Street boccie courts. According to the group's website, competing with the group's members will be representatives of Boston's Department of Neighborhood Development and the Boston Redevelopment Authority.

Though outdoor courts are more traditional, the New England climate makes indoor courts practical. Pagnoni's group of about a dozen players meets Monday mornings at a building on the premises of the former Lucent Technologies campus in North Andover.

There they assemble interlocking, white polystyrene bumpers constructed by Bill Hadley, 70, a retired mechanical engineer.

Pagnoni and his wife, Carmela, and 13 others showed up on a recent morning to play. Born in Naples, Carmela, 56, was Pagnoni's link to the game.

''Mario got into it being married to me for 35 years," she said. ''My father, Gennaro, gave him his first set of boccie balls. They were wooden, and we still have them. They're 90 years old."

Holding a green ball, Mario Pagnoni eyed the lemon-colored marker down the court, as his wife took aim at the other end.

''We need one more point," he said to Carmela.

''A piu forte," he said to her in Italian as she rolled her ball. Then switching to English, he repeated the message. ''A little harder. . . . That's the one. That's the one we need to win."

But then Peter Picarillo, 63, of Methuen, knocked her green ball away, and the point went to the red team, consisting of Clare Coco, 43, of North Andover; Del Bracci, 89, of Bradford; and Elie Labombarde, 82, of Hollis, N.H. Linda Fay, 62, of Methuen, and Roy Houde, 73, of Salem, N.H., rounded out Pagnoni's team.

On the next court, Jerry Valley, 70, Al Falco, 71, and Leo Roy, 71, all of Methuen; Lennie Saltzman, 66, of Andover; Al Falco, 71, of Salem, N.H.; and Joe Scuderi, 64, of Hamilton were involved in a spirited, friendly competition.

''That's a pair of sixes you just threw there," Scuderi said to Saltzman, extending his arms to measure the distance of the green ball to the pallino. ''Oh, baby, what a shot!"

But his joy was short-lived. Hadley's ball knocked it away, and red took the point.

''The main rule in boccie is no swearing," Scuderi said to a sideline visitor.

But Falco stepped in with a grin.

''We use Italian swears," he said, ''so it's OK."

Joyce Pellino Crane can be reached at crane@globe.com.