Somewhat surprising curling has emerged as one of the most popular Olympic events in Italy and managed to draw almost more spectators than the traditionally more popular figure skating events.
Yesterday's curling event managed to surpass figure skating in number of television viewers compared to the crowd that followed the figure skating - quite impressive when you consider that there are only 550 registered curling players in Italy. So it's rather safe to say that the Torino 2006 Olympics has managed to spread the word about this game (the consequence of the fact that tickets for the curling games are considerably cheaper than tickets for figure skating shouldn't be underestimated either!)

The game is even so little known here that some people even have compared the game to the traditional Italian game of bocce (boulle) only as a icey winter version.

Historically the sport first arrived in Italy in 1923 in Cortina, when an enterprising hotel owner introduced the game to entertain Scottish tourists, at least according to the Italian curling legend. And in connection with the Cortina Winter Games in 1956 the first curling club was founded, named Cristallo after the hotel where it all had started.

Click here for an easy introduction to the game of curling.