The focaccia di Recco col formaggio is the rare sandwich whose recipe is legally fixed. It carries an IGP, a protected geographical indication, which means the name is reserved for a specific product made a specific way within a defined zone around Recco on the Ligurian coast. The protected specification is narrow: two sheets of unleavened dough from soft wheat flour, water, extra-virgin olive oil, and salt, stretched to near-transparency by hand, enclosing fresh crescenza cheese laid in loose lumps, sealed at the edges, and baked at high heat until the surface blisters. Cheese type, dough composition, and the geographic boundary are all written down. A version made elsewhere, or with a substituted cheese, can be the same idea but cannot wear the name. The denomination is the defining fact here, more than any single ingredient.
That regulation exists because the construction is fragile and easy to fake badly. The dough has to be pulled until it is almost translucent, since a thicker sheet bakes doughy and loses the brittle-to-tender contrast that is the entire experience. The crescenza has to be fresh and fast-melting so it liquefies before the thin dough scorches in the fierce oven. Where the sheet meets the pan or rises into a blister it bakes to a shard; where it lies against the molten cheese it stays silky, and the alternation of those two textures in one bite is what the IGP is protecting. It is cut into squares and eaten with the fingers within minutes of leaving the oven, while the blisters still crack and the cheese still pulls, because it does not survive cooling.
The neighboring names describe the same craft at different distances from the protected term. The focaccia di Recco is the everyday short form of this exact product. The wider Ligurian focaccia col formaggio is the generic, unregulated description for the cheese-sealed unleavened sheet as other coastal towns bake it under their own labels. Those distinctions are real and deserve their own articles rather than being crowded in here.