Popular games of children and young people of Forio, as well as those ones of the whole island, were made with poor materials easy to procure, often related to the season or improvised. Only the biggest ones could afford to play with money. The favorite haunts were open spaces, such as squares and district courts.Some games are not typical of the island, if not in vernacular: the circle, thestrummolo ( (the top); ‘u tirapreta (the sling) built with an oak branch and recycled materials (the inner tube of bicycle the springs and the upper of an old shoe to the sheath of leather)‘u chirchio pè vucià (the circle for cruising), mostly of wood recycled from the vats used for the grape harvest, only in rare cases of iron hopscotch, mainly practiced by girls; bat and Pinzo, a sort of baseball played with a bat made from a branch of oak or rowan and the Pinzo, a piece of wood shorter, smooth and sharp that resting to the ground and hit the tip, and rose was beaten with the bat to be launched as far as possible; ‘a rucilià ( a race from the top of a pile of soil‘a carruzzella, a kind of wooden cart with wheels.
In other games there were common objects, found easily at home, outdoors or made available by nature depending on the season. With the kernels of medlars, for example, the boys built thecastles, side by side, with a core they competed to target and destroy the most number of castles. The girls were playing instead of the fountain, which threw the bones of medlar trying to get them to fall into the fountain.
Among the games played indoors include those made with walnuts, calledhazelnuts, linked to the Christmas period at the end of Christmas dinner hazelnuts were given to children who harvested them in cloth bags. The boys played the game of castles, the girls in the game of fountain or finger inside. In this game the hazelnuts were thrown on a table or on the floor, each participant in turn had to pass a finger into the gap between two nuts trying not to touch them and then gave a tap hazelnut so as to touch each other, if he could touch only the hazelnut, it won one. Always the hazelnuts were the raw material of another game, which is to launch a career to break down the other line. In May, the nuts were replaced by empty cartridges collected in the woods: the shells were lined up and tried to shoot them down with the launch of two cartridges inserted into one another.
In the square in Panza a popular pastime among young people was the game of knights, in which were two roles, the horse and the rider: the boys drawn as horses were placed with their face against the wall, a knight around his waist with his hands and the other rode on the horse taking a running start, piling up to six together. Also in the square Panza, paved with basalt to trachyte of Vesuvius, people played marma: people throw a coin in the air, won the player who dropped the coin closer to the center of the plate (the marma). If the coins missed people used the buttons.
The coins were part of the other two games, reserved for older kids: the launch of the iron ball and azzeccamuro. The launch of the iron ball each player plunged a penny to half in the ground and take turns throwing an iron ball trying to shaken out as much money as possible. Theazzeccamuro took place in a sunny zone sheltered from the wind: each participant threw a coin in order to make it as close as possible to the wall. The winner collecting all the coins thrown. The wall could be replaced by a line marked on the ground, when a player could drop the coin in the middle of the line it said that he had "split the sign", but if the money came out of the line the player had left out the "schero".
A variant of azzeccamuro was ‘a barracca. Based on the coin falls closer to the wall or beyond the line set out a classification: the first took in hand all the coins and, after having manipulated the launch into the air. Won coins falling with his head on the exposed side, while the others were re-launched by the next player on the list until it is exhausted. The game's name comes from the word "’a barracca" that could be given by a participant to invalidate the game in case of suspected cheating before the coins thrown to fall down.
During the winter in the streets, to feel less cold, they played slap: one of the participants had to parry the blows received from others on the open palm under his arm, trying to keep his balance.
A game even more dynamic was theazzancaferro or azzangafierro: a participant was drawn with the task to resume the others were scattered and tried to escape the grip not making touch, touching a gate or an iron object (in dialect "azzancando the iron"), and if the object was made of wood the game took the name of azzangalegname. azzangalegname.
A fun "food" was to racioppare, that is turning through the vineyards from late October to Christmas in search of grapes left on the vine or grape harvest escaped the so-called "tempestina" matured late.
