La Panarda, one of the world’s most epic feasts, is about to take place in this Italian village

In Europe’s most food-obsessed country, the season of excess has finished. Across Italy, families have finished the panettone, slurped down tortellini, and consumed platefuls of lentils—a tradition to augur good luck for the new year.

But as the country winds down from its festive feasts, one small village in Abruzzo, a mountainous region in central-southern Italy, is preparing to eat like never before.

What is La Panarda?

Every January 16, Villavallelonga, a village in the mountains of the Parco Nazionale d’Abruzzo (Lazio e Molise), Italy’s oldest national park, will hold its annual Panarda, a vast feast for the entire community.

Around 80 families in the village of just 900 residents spend days preparing multicourse spreads of up to 50 dishes to share with friends and family, so that nobody in the village goes hungry

At around 8 p.m., they start with an antipasto (appetizer spread) of 10 dishes, then move on to soup, pasta, and rich meat-and-vegetable courses.

They stagger home to bed at around 3 or 4 a.m.—if they’re early birds. Others might carouse through the night or get straight back in the kitchen to prepare favata, the fava-bean soup that families traditionally served the following day.

“It was the biggest banquet I ever saw,” says Marco Zorzanello, who photographed Villavallelonga’s Panarda in 2025. “In Italy, we feel the importance of food deeply, and this is the ultimate example of the value that food has for Italians.”

Who is St. Anthony Abbot?

The roots of this gourmet excess are deeply tied to religion. La Panarda is held in honor of St. Anthony Abbot, the patron saint of animals. The people of this farming village have long devoted themselves to the saint, whose feast day runs from the evening of January 16 to the early morning of January 17. “It was a peasant society, and animals meant survival,” says Maria Cesidia Giancursio, one of the village’s 80 panardieri, or Panarda-makers. “Animals gave them milk and meat, enabling them to work the fields. Protecting them was extremely important.”

Villavallelonga’s first Panarda was documented in 1657, though it’s likely the feast is older, says Mayor Leonardo Lippa. The tradition is rooted in two ‘miracles’ supposedly performed by St. Anthony Abbot.

In one, tradition tells that a local landowner, one Signore Serafini, unwittingly had his land harvested by strangers who turned out to be devils. The saint is said to have sent them fleeing, and Signora Serafini vowed to distribute lunch to half the village as thanks.

The second story, also dating back to the 1600s, tells how St. Anthony saved a baby snatched by a wolf. As thanks, the mother of the Bianchi family vowed to feed half the village a fava-bean stew.

Lippa, who has attended the Panarda every year since he was an infant, says the tradition is crucial to locals. “It’s very strongly felt in the village. I’ve felt it from my birth,” he says.

It’s not just locals who love the Panarda. Lippa says that some descendants of emigrants from Villavallelonga return each year for the festivities.

For Francis Cretarola, the grandson of Abruzzese emigrants and owner of Le Virtù restaurant in Philadelphia, attending last year’s Panarda was transformative.

“It really does change you,” he says. “It makes you think: What does a restaurant mean? What does sitting down to eat with people mean? Everything felt incredibly meaningful.”

A communal feast with a purpose

Villavallelonga’s Panarda isn’t the only communal feasting ritual in Italy. In fact, “panarda” is a common word for a community feast in Abruzzo, although residents host them mostly in summer. For Luca Cesari, a historian of Italian gastronomy, they’re a portal to the past.

“They usually started as works of benevolence,” he says. “They’re very important traditions because they arose in towns where there were poor people, or pilgrims who had to be hosted.  By taking care of these passersby, the communities were putting into action the Seven Works of Mercy,” the Bible’s instructions to help the poor.

“It was a social duty,” says Cesari. “It’s a dimension that we’ve lost. We pay tax, and so someone else takes care of it, but in a traditional society, that didn’t happen. On feast days, they would vie to offer wayfarers not just a hot meal but a convivial night at people’s own homes.”

While Zorzanello and Cretarola were at La Panarda last year, Cesari was in Molise, south of Abruzzo, celebrating the Tavolate di San Giuseppe, a similar tradition in which celebrants go from house to house singing traditional prayers before being invited inside to eat.

“You pray and eat together, drink wine and go on to the next stop,” says Cesari. “Nowadays we go out every Saturday night, but it wasn’t like that, especially in isolated villages, so these festivals presented a convivial moment to be together with others, eat, and talk.” He calls his experience “very intimate—you feel it’s an ancient ritual.”

In Villavallelonga, the festivities last for days. From January 11th, there are parades of kids singing, masked ‘devils’ (a European winter tradition dating back to pre-Christian times), and plates of cooked fava beans with bread and frascarelli(a couscous-like pasta) delivered to each villager by descendants of the Serafinis. The day after the Panarda, descendants of the Bianchi family distribute favata, that fava-bean stew, to every house.

A talisman of prosperity

Traditions like this are disappearing across Italy, says Cesari, as the modern world impinges. Perhaps Villavallelonga’s remote location has saved its Panarda. The village sits on the mountainside within the national park, which is home to the Marsican brown bear. “At the end of the road you’re completely surrounded by woods,” says Cretarola, who holds an annual Panarda at his Philadelphia restaurant.

But there’s another reason that Villavallelonga has passed its tradition down through the generations. “There’s a kind of fear that if you don’t do it, St. Anthony will do something to us,” says Giancursio, who’s heard apocryphal tales of relatives who didn’t want to host, and found their hat burned or their car caught fire. St. Anthony Abbot is associated with fire.

“We made a vow to do this,” says Giancursio, who’s a descendant of the Serafini family. “If you’re religious, you feel that responsibility. You don’t have a choice. You must do it.”

Giancursio took over her family’s Panarda after the death of her mother. Every January 16, she’s in the kitchen by 6 a.m., preparing what she calls a “small” Panarda for up to 15 people.

The previous day, she’ll have prepared the rich mutton sauce for Villavallelonga’s signature dish, maccheroni al sugo di pecora, featured in a dialect verse sung by local kids during the Panarda.

And during the week leading up to the event, she’ll have prepared her home, hanging an image of St. Anthony, and weaving wreaths of dried figs, oranges, apples, and fava beans to hang outside, indicating that a Panarda is taking place. She also makes fava-bean wreaths to represent the livestock her family once owned. In the past, people hung them in the stables and fed sick animals the beans from the previous Panarda.

On the night of the feast, her guests will enjoy a spread of antipasto dishes, egg-pasta maccheroni, broths with bignè pasta with meat, and mutton with vegetables, followed by fried desserts.

“There aren’t loads of dishes, but it’s a banquet in portion sizes,” she says. “It’s like a talisman for future prosperity.”

Every house, says Mayor Lippa, leaves room for extra visitors. “It’s a private event, but one seat is always left empty,” he says.

Cretarola says that attending as a guest was transformative. “Nobody’s making any money—it was just about taking care of each other,” he says. “At the risk of sounding trite, I think we need that right now.”

(What can food tell us about who we are? Stanley Tucci finds out as he returns to Italy.)

Julia Buckley is a former travel editor for UK newspapers. She followed her Tuscan and Ligurian family roots back to Italy, where she has lived in Venice and Sicily, writing about Italian culture, history and food. She also specializes in South America, especially Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil.