There was one corner of Woodlawn that seemed as if it would always remain stubbornly Italian: the bocce courts in Van Cortlandt Park.
But as older Italian men died or moved away from this north Bronx neighborhood, the nightly bocce games stopped. Weeds sprouted. Children mistook the rectangular courts for sandboxes. Dogs ran loose on them. Eventually park officials considered razing them to make way for more benches.

Then came the unexpected. As the ground thawed in late March, new players surfaced, with shovels and rakes to pull out the weeds before starting games again. Only these were not the men of old — they were not men at all. “Now it’s a new age,” declared Maria Maksym, 67, one of the new players. “It’s old women.”
Though a few men appeared, they have watched curiously from the sidelines.

“I think they’re waiting for the women to do the cleanup, and then they’ll join,” said Josephine M. Bastone, founder of the newly formed Bastone Bocce League, which is tossing around team names like “Bocce Babes.”

The bocce revival has happened all over the country as a dusty old game favored by Italian old-timers has evolved into a trendy social sport — one largely without taxing physical demands— played out on neighborhood courts as well as in more glamorous bocce halls complete with bars and bands. The goal of the game is for players to toss a ball closest to a smaller ball — called a pallino — that serves as a target.
In New York, where bocce has long been found in Italian enclaves like Little Italy, the game has increasingly spread to other neighborhoods and been embraced by a new generation of players from hipsters in Brooklyn attracted by its throwback appeal to gray-haired ladies in the Bronx eager to reconnect over the slower rhythms of an earlier time..