“Against the ball, put the laser against the ball, kid! Madone.”

I was folded over on one knee at Boston’s North End bocce courts, trying to get the guys a measurement. Eyeing the distance between a bocce ball and a pallino often doesn’t work, so Sammy Viscione comes armed with both a tape and a laser measure, though his sciatica makes it impossible for him to bend. So he asked me to do the laser measurement. I’m inept with tools, and the guys kept hollering, “Against the ball, kid!” Someone else said, “Bocce, baby!” in that keyed-up way that meant he lives for this.

Bocce breathes in the oldest memories of Sammy and this clan of 40-plus men, most in their eighth decade, many of them veterans. My buddy Jimmy Pasto, who grew up in the North End, told me about these characters. There’s no other word for them. I was eager to experience their bocce brotherhood, its out-of-time aura, its connection to a living Italian-American history. And as someone who’s written much about the compensatory bluster of manhood, I was intensely interested in witnessing what their masculine camaraderie looked like in our post-masculine age.

Image Bocce is by some accounts the oldest sport on earth. Credit... M. Scott Brauer for The New York Times

The guys call Sammy “the commissioner” because he presides over the bocce league through the Friends of the North End, a 45-year-old fraternity of paisanos with sacred memories. “This place is our rightful inheritance,” Sammy told me. “Our fathers and grandfathers played here.” Every Sunday morning, this ritual at the bocce court is their Mass.