The pitta con cicoli is the version where the filling is worked into the bread rather than layered between its halves, and that is what defines it. Cicoli are pork cracklings, the crisp, salty, fat-rich residue left when pork fat and trim are rendered down, and in this build they are folded through the pitta dough itself before it is shaped into its ring and baked. The result is not a sandwich of bread plus filling but a bread that carries its filling inside it: pockets of savoury, chewy crackling suspended in a crisp-crusted, close crumb, the rendered fat enriching the dough from within. The defining fact is that the two are inseparable by construction. There is no smear and no slice to slide out, because the seasoning is baked in.
The craft is the dough and the distribution of the cicoli. The base is the same leavened ring as the plain pitta calabrese, proofed and baked hot enough that the crust crackles and the crumb sets firm, with the central hole doing its structural job of letting the dough bake through evenly. The cicoli are folded in cool and broken to a size that scatters through the dough rather than clumping into greasy pockets that would tear the crumb or fry it from the inside, and they are added in proportion so the bread stays bread, enriched and studded, not a fritter. The fat they release lubricates the crumb and is part of the point, which is why the ring is baked rather than fried: the oven sets a structure around the melting fat instead of letting it run. A good pitta con cicoli eats as a savoury bread with crackling through it, firm and a little rich; a sloppy one overloads the dough so it bakes greasy and dense and the ring will not hold.
The variations are the close relatives that change the fat or split the ring for a filling. There is the plain pitta calabrese split and filled rather than baked with the cracklings in, the version that leans on nduja for heat instead of plain rendered fat, the build with soppressata layered into a split ring, and the wider family of southern enriched breads worked with rendered pork. Each of those is the same ring with one decision changed, and each deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here.