The virtù of May Day, a composite dish traditionally prepared in Teramo and in several towns across its province, represent the quintessential expression of the city’s gastronomic culture. Their defining feature lies in the coexistence of a wide variety of ingredients, belonging to distinct categories — dried legumes, fresh legumes, leafy greens, spring vegetables, aromatic and wild herbs, cured ham, pork rind, bones and cartilage, sometimes small beef meatballs, and different shapes and types of pasta — each cooked separately and only combined at the final stage, so that every element retains its own flavour within a harmonious and balanced whole.

The dish represents a tangible expression of the meeting between the “clearing out” of winter pantries — with leftover legumes and cereals from the cold season’s stores — and the first wild and cultivated produce already available, forming a gastronomic synthesis that precisely reflects the calendrical threshold between winter and spring. Anthropological studies by Franco Cercone, Giuseppe Di Domenicantonio, Giuseppe Profeta, Alessandra Gasparroni and Emiliano Giancristofaro place virtù within a broader system of May Day ritual foods found across Abruzzo, with corresponding lexical variants throughout the region and neighbouring areas: totemaje in the Frentano areas and the Altopiani Maggiori (especially in Pescocostanzo), granati in the Aventino and Sangro valleys and in the Conca Peligna (in Torricella Peligna), lessame in Atessa, and vertuti in Cittaducale (now in the province of Rieti). All these names refer to the same ritual practice of cooking and sharing legumes and cereals, united by their capacity to “generate anew through sowing”, as Cercone himself notes, drawing on the work of folklorists Antonio De Nino, Gennaro Finamore and Michele Javicoli.

The earliest reference to a preparation comparable to virtù is generally traced back to Poggio Bracciolini, who in his Facetiae of the mid-fifteenth century describes a Roman custom of cooking together, on the calends of May, various legumes known as virtutes. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Teramo scholar Giuseppe Savini revisited this account, linking it to local practice and influencing subsequent literature. However, these references reveal a similarity that is primarily nominal and calendrical, rather than evidence of a historically documented line of continuity for the dish.

An essential aspect in the preparation of Teramo’s virtù is sourcing: the abundance of leafy greens and wild herbs requires a direct relationship with local growers, who, in the days leading up to May Day, assemble dedicated assortments of young vegetables and spring mixed greens, gathered from the few market gardens that still edge the city. The recipe is therefore not fixed: each family preserves its own version, and the ingredients vary in number and type according to availability, domestic memory and the creativity of the cook, with a widespread tendency to reach or exceed forty components. At its core, the practice remains domestic and largely in female hands. However, its growing presence in local restaurants has gradually established the parallel habit of ordering variable quantities in advance and collecting them on the morning of 1 May, dotting the urban landscape with lines of customers carrying pots and saucepans as they wait their turn.

Preparation begins several days in advance and unfolds according to a predefined sequence of interlinked steps: sourcing and selecting ingredients, cleaning and trimming, soaking, separate cooking, preparing the different types of pasta, and the final combining of all elements in the days immediately preceding 1 May. The guiding principle is the care devoted to the final assembly, which requires a complex knowledge of both eye and palate, acquired through repeated practice. The quality of the dish, therefore, depends on the ability to recognise a balance of colour, aroma and texture — a balance that, in Teramo kitchens, marks the clear boundary between a well-made virtù and a more approximate version, closer to a conventional minestrone.

On a symbolic level, virtù condense a dimension of reciprocity that defines their social meaning: they are prepared in quantities far exceeding the needs of the household precisely because they are intended to be shared with neighbours, relatives, and anyone who stops by during the day. More than in the complexity of its preparation, more than in the complexity of the preparation itself, the deeply communal nature of the dish lies in this circulation and sharing within the home: an economy of food-based gift exchange that the city has continued to practise even as almost all other elements of its agrarian heritage have gradually transformed.