The pezzente is the salame Basilicata made out of the cuts nobody else wanted, and the sandwich is built around exactly that fact. The name means the beggar, and the sausage earns it: head, cheek, organ trim and the lean scraps left after the better salami were filled, ground coarse, worked hard with garlic and a great deal of dried sweet pepper, and dried soft rather than hard. It does not slice into clean translucent discs the way a Felino does. It is rustic, paprika-red, faintly soft in the centre, and assertive enough that a panino needs only a few thick pieces of it and the bread it belongs with to be a full sandwich.
The craft is the cut and the bread under it. Because the pezzente is soft and coarse it is cut thick, into rounds with weight to them, so it keeps its chew instead of disappearing; sliced thin it would smear. The paprika gives it a sweet heat and a fat that, at room temperature, just begins to gloss the crumb, so the bread is taken dense and country, a pane casereccio or a Materano loaf with a hard crust, something with structure to push back against a strong, fatty, slightly yielding meat rather than a soft white roll that would collapse under it. Nothing is added. A spread or a cheese would only mask a salame whose entire point is its loud, cheap-cut directness, and the sandwich is eaten with the meat at room temperature, when that fat reads softest.
Basilicata and the rest of the South cure a long shelf of these strong rustic salami, and each is its own subject rather than a variation on this one. There is the soppressata lucana pressed flat and firmer, the salsiccia lucana dried hard with fennel and chilli, the related organ-and-trim sausages of Puglia and Calabria, and the gentler hands that ease the paprika back. Each is a different poor-cut salame given its regional bread, and each deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here.