Bocce
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40 free Bocce trivia questions with answers — sports quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Bocce looks like the simplest game in the park: roll a ball, get close to the little one, argue about who is nearer. Behind it sits a long history that runs from ancient pastimes through royal bans and village squares to modern world championships, and a rulebook with more bite than most backyard players expect. This quiz covers both sides. There are questions on how a frame is played and scored, what counts as a legal throw, and how the open game common in North America differs from the stricter international form. Others follow the sport's story through Italian cities, emigrant communities in the Americas and the Balkans, and the related games it inspired or grew up beside. It is pitched for casual players, league regulars and trivia hosts alike. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will leave knowing a little more about the game than when you arrived.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Excavators found a set of bocce balls in a room, later nicknamed the bocciodromo, of which ancient town?
Pompeii
Pompeii preserved the set under volcanic ash, a sign that the Romans had already turned stone-throwing from a test of strength into a game of aim at a fixed target.
Q 02Which Roman emperor is said to have owned a prized set of bocce balls made of olive root?
Augustus
Augustus kept his fine olive-root set in the years when Romans were first swapping stone balls for wooden ones.
Q 03Bocce's accessibility to all ages and abilities has made it a popular official sport of which organisation?
Special Olympics
Special Olympics programmes took to bocce because people of every age and ability can play, and many set up inflatable PVC courts that pack away after a session.
Q 04Bocce balls are true spheres, unlike the lopsided balls that curve as they roll in which related sport?
Lawn bowls
Lawn bowls uses balls shaped with a bias so that they swing in an arc, while a bocce ball has no built-in bias and runs straight.
Q 05Boccia, a relative of bocce played with soft leather balls, has been part of which multi-sport event since 1984?
Paralympic Games
The Paralympic Games added boccia in New York and Stoke Mandeville, and it remains one of only two sports there with no Olympic counterpart, alongside goalball.
Q 06Medieval kings banned bowling games like bocce because they wanted their men to practise which skill instead?
Archery
Archery won battles, so an English king barred his bowmen from the game, and two French kings later forbade it to commoners until the 1600s.
Q 07In pétanque, bocce's French cousin, the target ball is called the cochonnet, a word meaning which animal?
Piglet
Piglet is the literal meaning of cochonnet, one of several French nicknames for the little ball, alongside others that mean the goal and the little one.
Q 08In bocce, what Italian name, sometimes translated as 'bullet', is given to the small target ball?
Pallino
Pallino is the usual name, though some regions prefer boccino, and the first throw of every frame sends it down the court for both sides to chase.
Q 09Bolas criollas, a bocce-like sport played with red and green balls, is a tradition of which country?
Venezuela
Venezuela treats bolas criollas as an icon of its cattle-plains culture, and the Venezuelan style has spread to Aruba, Curaçao and Bonaire.
Q 10Which ancient Greek thinker recommended a stone-throwing ancestor of bocce as a way to stay healthy?
Hippocrates
Hippocrates advised the game in his medical treatises, and centuries later the physician Galen was prescribing it to the young and the old alike.
Q 11In traditional bocce, a ball lofted through the air must be thrown with which kind of arm action?
Underarm
Underarm throws are the only kind allowed, and players use them mostly to knock the target ball or a rival ball into a more favourable spot.
Q 12Once both sides have rolled a ball in a bocce frame, which side must throw the next one?
Whichever is farther away
Whichever is farther away keeps throwing until it gets a ball inside the rival's best or runs out, which is why one side can roll several balls in a row.
Q 13A standard bocce set holds how many large balls, split evenly between the colours of two sides?
8
A full set has 8 balls, so in singles one player rolls a whole colour alone, while in doubles each partner rolls half of the team's share.
Q 21Gioco delle bocchie, the 1753 manual that first set out bocce rules in Italian, was published in which city?
Bologna
Bologna printed Raffaele Bisteghi's handbook at a time when bocce matches in Piedmont were so noisy that players were often moved on from church squares.
Q 22Which Italian city saw the country's first bocce club form in 1873 and its first national championship in 1919?
Turin
Turin led the way for organised bocce, and 137 players entered that first championship, which was for singles only.
Q 23Which pope is named alongside President Sandro Pertini among the famous figures who helped bocce grow in Italy?
John Paul II
John Paul II and Pertini lent their fame in the years when club competitions took off, shortly before the world's bocce federations united in 1985.
Q 14Which bocce shot is lofted to hit its target on the full or after a short hop?
Volo
Volo comes from volare, and the shot is spectacular enough to give its name to a whole variant of the game played with a run-up.
Q 15In US open bocce, a player's foot may touch but not fully cross which court marking before release?
Foul line
Foul line rulings are forgiving in the open game: as long as part of the foot, even the heel, remains on the line, the throw counts.
Q 16In strict international bocce, what must a player declare before trying to knock a ball away with a throw?
The intended target
The intended target has to be named in advance, and a breach lets the other side keep the result or have everything put back where it was.
Q 17In international bocce, officials mark where each ball lies with what, so play can be reset after a breach?
Chalk
Chalk marks on the court record the position of every ball, large and small, so a throw that breaks the rules can be undone exactly.
Q 18One bocce variant, thrown after a run-up to the line, swaps the traditional ball for one of which material?
Metal
Metal balls, usually bronze, set the variant apart, and its throwers are known for a run-up that is athletic, even theatrical.
Q 19In traditional bocce, what happens if the starting side twice fails to land the target ball in the zone?
Opponents place it
Opponents place it wherever they like inside the zone, but the side that first tried keeps the right to roll the opening ball.
Q 20In US open bocce, a rolled ball is dead if it reaches which part of the court without touching another ball?
The backboard
The backboard kills any ball that reaches it without first touching another ball or the target, although the side boards may be used at any time.
Q 24The world confederation uniting the bocce and pétanque federations was founded in 1985 in which tiny state?
Monaco
Monaco hosted the founding on 21 December 1985, when three international federations joined forces to lobby for a place at the Summer Games.
Q 25Bocce reached a North Carolina town in 1893 with Italian immigrants belonging to which religious group?
Waldensians
Waldensians made bocce a cornerstone of Valdese life, and their mutual aid society runs covered, lighted clay courts that host a state tournament each September.
Q 26Which Brazilian city, where Italian families founded a bocce club in 1952, marks its own bocce day each 25 May?
Curitiba
Curitiba's Italian families called their club Sociedade 25 de Maio, and the city developed a classic style of its own in which the ball is rolled, never thrown.
Q 27Known there as bochas, bocce has its main South American home in which country with a large Italian community?
Argentina
Argentina took up bochas with its Italian immigrants, who at first were the only players before later generations and outsiders joined in.
Q 28In which former Yugoslav republic is bocce known as balinanje rather than by the Serbo-Croatian name boćanje?
Slovenia
Slovenia also knows the game colloquially as bale, from the Venetian word for balls, a trace of how it spread along the eastern Adriatic.
Q 29Stone balls from about 7000 BC, possibly an early form of bocce, were unearthed at Çatalhöyük in which country?
Turkey
Turkey's Neolithic town yielded spheres worn as if rolled over rough ground, though the archaeologist James Mellaart suspected they had a religious use.
Q 30Which famous square in Rome once held a vast bocce ground that hundreds of players crowded into every day?
Piazza Navona
Piazza Navona was the city's great bowling ground in the centuries when the game was booming across Italy in spite of local bans.