The focaccia barese is the tall member of the family, and its height is the whole argument. Bari builds its dough with a share of fine semolina and boiled, riced potato worked into the wheat flour, which gives a crumb that is soft, slightly elastic, and able to hold a great deal of oil without turning to grease. The disc is pressed into a round tin, dimpled hard, then topped before baking with halved cherry tomatoes pushed cut-side up into the dough, scattered olives left whole with their stones, a heavy pour of olive oil, coarse salt, and dried oregano. It bakes until the rim is deep gold and the tomatoes have collapsed into sweet, jammy pockets. Eaten on its own, warm, torn rather than sliced, it is already complete, which is why in Bari the plain round outsells anything built on it.
As a sandwich base its logic is the absorbent crumb. The potato in the dough lets the focaccia drink the tomato juice and the oil without the structure giving way, so a wedge stays intact in the hand even when the underside is glossy and saturated. The oregano is not a garnish but a load-bearing flavor: it cuts the richness of the oil and frames the tomato, and a barese without it tastes unfinished. The olives, left whole, are a deliberate friction, a brine-and-stone interruption that keeps the soft crumb from reading as one note. Heat behaves kindly here. The disc holds warmth at its center long after the rim has set, so it travels from the forno to the table without needing to be eaten in a hurry, and it survives a few hours at room temperature on a counter better than a thin bread would.
The named variants split into clear directions. The split-and-filled version, the focaccia barese farcita, takes the same round, halves it horizontally, and turns it into a closed sandwich. Smaller bakeries press a share of patata harder for a denser, almost cake-like crumb, while others lean toward more semolina for a coarser, sandier bite. There are versions that swap the cherry tomato for a smear of passata, and seasonal rounds that add wild onion or a different cured olive from the Murge hills. Each of these is a real and distinct thing, and they deserve their own articles rather than being crowded in here.