The panino con capocollo di Martina Franca is the cured-neck panino of the Valle d'Itria, and what sets it apart is smoke and a sweet brush rather than chilli. The pork neck is salted, then bathed or brushed with vincotto, the reduced grape must of the Murgia, which leaves a dark sheen and a faint sweetness on the muscle. It is then cold-smoked over fragrant Mediterranean wood, almond shell and macchia scrub, so the slice reads of woodsmoke and a low caramelled note running under the cured pork. That combination, smoke and vincotto against a fatty neck muscle, is unmistakably of this one Puglian town and is the entire reason the sandwich carries the place name.
The craft is keeping both the smoke and the sweetness in proportion to the meat. The capocollo is sliced thin so the smoke comes forward without turning acrid, and the soft fat through the neck muscle carries that smoke the way the chilli is carried in the Calabrian version. The bread is the dense durum loaf of the region, often pane di Altamura, whose own toasted-wheat depth meets the smoke instead of being erased by it; a soft white roll would let the capocollo dominate and waste the bread. The classic build adds nothing, the logic being that a smoked, vincotto-glazed cure is already a complete and complex flavour, and a second strong element would muddy it. Where a bridge is used it leans into the existing register, a soft local cheese to round the smoke or a few drops more vincotto against the salt, never an acid or a competing cured meat that would argue with the sweetness.
The variations are narrow and Pugliese, mostly about how far the smoke and the vincotto are pushed: the more heavily smoked stick, the sweeter-glazed reading, the pairing with a fresh primo sale to soften it. The chilli-cured Calabrian neck and the fennel-and-pepper Tuscan one and the Umbrian Norcia style are each a separate cure entirely. Each is one cured meat given its bread, and each deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here.