Ruzzolone

Cheese-rolling may be the new soccer.

Like soccer, the sport of cheese-rolling may have begun in England, where the almost famous Gloucestershire cheese roll has become a tradition. That event, you'll recall, involves drunken Englishmen competing to roll a wheel of Double Gloucester cheese down a hill the fastest.

But just like in soccer, what the English invented, the Italians have perfected. Anyway, that is probably the opinion of many strange folks in the Umbrian hill town of Panicale. Each year on the day after Easter, they have an annual competition there called Ruzzolone ("big wheel").

It's an intense affair, in which people take turns rolling a wheel of Pecorino around the medieval town. The player who gets his wheel from point A to point B with the fewest rolls wins.

The blog See You in Italy reported on Ruzzolone recently, which in turn got the New York Times to follow suit, in a recent piece in the Travel section.

Though the game may be fun to play, I'm not sure it's going to surpass soccer soon as the world's favorite spectator sport. Here's how blogger Stew Vreeland describes the action:

The cheese rolls, the crowd runs along side of it and someone marks where it wobbles to a stop with bit of chalk on the street.

It's not quite the World Cup, but the people of Panicale seem to enjoy it. Now, if they just set up a match against Gloucester....