The panino con salame di turgia is built around a Piedmontese salame that is not made only from pork. In the Valli di Lanzo, the high valleys above Turin, the turgia is a cow that has reached the end of its working or milking life, and its lean, dark, mature meat is the base of this salame, blended with pork fat and sometimes a little goat to round it. The result is a cured meat with a deeper, more mineral, almost gamey edge than a pork salame, firm and lean, scented with pepper and the mountain herbs and wine of the valley. The animal is the defining fact: this is mountain cattle preserved, and the sandwich tastes of where it comes from.
The craft is in cutting a lean, assertive meat so it does not dry out the bite. Salame di turgia is sliced moderately thick, because shaved too thin a lean cured meat loses its meatiness and reads only as salt; cut with some body it keeps its chew and its dark, savoury depth. The bread is plain and sturdy, an Alpine-leaning crusted roll, so a strong valley salame meets a carrier solid enough to push against rather than a soft crumb that would let it dominate unchecked. Little or nothing is added, because the turgia already carries its own forceful character; at most a plain bread is left plain, the quality settled at the valley salumeria where the salame was cut.
The variations are best understood against the rest of the salame family, and each is its own subject. The soft jar-preserved salam d'la duja and the cooked, warm salame cotto, both Piedmontese like this one but built from pork; the fine hand-tied Felino of Parma, the large-grained sweet Varzi of the Oltrepò, the garlic-and-wine mantovano, the fennel-cured Sicilian Sant'Angelo. Each is a distinct cure on its own bread, and the cow-and-goat turgia stands apart as the one that leaves pork behind. Each of those deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here.