The panino ligure reads as Liguria before anything else, and Liguria's larder is a thin coastal strip with little room for cattle, so its sandwich leans on oil, herb, and the sea rather than on a heavy cured meat. The signature is threefold: focaccia, the dimpled olive-oil flatbread Genoa builds its bread culture on, used split as the sandwich itself; pesto, the raw basil, pine nut, and Parmigiano sauce of the region, working as a filling and a binder at once; and the salt-cured anchovy of the Riviera, the small, intense fish that Ligurian cooking reaches for the way other regions reach for a salame. A roll of focaccia with one of those, dressed and stopped, is the panino.
The craft is moisture control against a bread that is already oiled. Focaccia split horizontally arrives with salt and olive oil pooled in its dimples, so it is doing flavour work before anything is added, which means the filling has to be measured against it rather than piled on. Pesto is structural here as much as it is a sauce: spread on the crumb it waterproofs the bread and binds a loose filling, so a focaccia with pesto and little else already holds together. Anchovy is the strongest voice on the coast and is used in the smallest quantity, lifted with parsley and oil so its salt reads as depth rather than a slap. A wet vegetable, a grilled aubergine or a marinated artichoke, is drained so it does not turn an oily bread to sponge. Nothing is added that would argue with the oil already in the loaf.
Its variations stay on the Riviera and in its pantry. The plain focaccia split with prosciutto or cheese, the pesto and green-bean reading, the anchovy of Monterosso treated al verde, the farinata chickpea version folded into bread. The cheese-thin focaccia di Recco is a construction of its own. Each of those is a distinct preparation with its own balance to strike, and each deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here.