The panino con salame Felino is built around the salame of the Parma hills, and its defining quality is delicacy. Felino is made from pork minced to a medium grain, seasoned simply with salt, pepper, a little garlic and wine, and cured slowly in the same gentle hill air that makes Parma ham. It is shaped by hand into a slightly tapered, irregular cylinder and tied, not pressed into a uniform mould, and it carries a clean, sweet, low-spiced flavour with none of the harsh, sharp, cured-pink edge of an industrial salame. The restraint is the point: this is a salame that tastes mostly of good pork, lightly seasoned, and the sandwich is a frame for that mildness rather than a vehicle for spice.
The craft is in the cut and the bread that suits a gentle meat. Felino is cut on a long bias into thin oval slices, thinner than a coarse salame would allow, because the fine grain and soft fat hold together when shaved and the delicacy reads best in a slice with some translucence. It wants a plain, lightly crusted bread, a clean roll rather than a strong country loaf, so a subtle salame is not overpowered by an assertive crumb. Nothing much is added, because anything sharp or fatty laid alongside it would trample a flavour built on understatement; at most the bread stays plain and the slices are laid generously but loose. The sandwich is settled at the Parma salumeria where the salame was hand-cut, not at assembly.
The variations are best read 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 of Piedmont, the cow-and-goat turgia of the Lanzo valleys, the coarse 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 fine, hand-tied, delicate Felino stands apart by its restraint. Each of those deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here.