Focaccia con le olive is the Ligurian dimpled focaccia organized around the olive, and in Liguria that usually means the taggiasca, the small, dark, almost sweet olive of the western Riviera. The base is the standard one: an oil-rich dough pressed into a tray, dimpled deep, brushed with a salty-water brine so the wells stay glossy. The olives are pressed into the dough before baking, often left whole with their stones, sometimes scattered loose and sometimes tucked into the dimples themselves. As the disc bakes the olives soften and their oil weeps into the surrounding crumb, leaving small pockets of concentrated brine and fruit across an otherwise plain, salted bread. The whole point is that punctuation: an even field of soft oiled crumb interrupted at intervals by something sharp and meaty.
The craft is restraint and the choice of olive. Too many olives and the bread loses its structure into a wet, salty mass; too few and the variant is indistinguishable from a plain round. The Ligurian instinct is a measured scatter, enough that most cuts carry two or three but the crumb still dominates. The taggiasca is favored because it is small and low in bitterness, so it reads as fruity rather than aggressive against the salt of the crust and the oil in the dough; a larger, sharper brined olive shifts the whole thing toward something harsher. Whole olives with stones are common, which is a deliberate trade of convenience for flavor, since a pitted olive bleeds more and tastes flatter. Split and filled it pairs naturally with a mild cheese or a thin cured meat, but it is most often eaten plain and warm, by the cut.
The named siblings swap the topping while keeping the dimpled base. The focaccia con le cipolle uses onion for a sweet rather than briny surface. The plain Genovese disc is the unadorned parent, and the crisper, thinner town styles along the coast take the same dough elsewhere. Those are each their own subject and deserve their own articles rather than being crowded in here.