The pizza bianca con fichi is the Roman split-bread build that turns on a single seasonal contrast: ripe figs against salt and fat, carried on a flatbread that brings neither. Pizza bianca is the Roman white flatbread, a long blistered sheet of leavened dough baked hot, brushed with oil and salt, with a crisp shell and an airy, slightly chewy crumb. Split open while warm and filled with split late-summer figs and a thin layer of prosciutto or a soft fresh cheese, it becomes a sandwich whose whole logic is the meeting of the figs' jammy sweetness with a salt-fat counterweight, held in bread that is mostly crust, air, and oil. The defining fact is that the figs cannot carry it alone, the cured fat or cheese cannot carry it alone, and the bread is the neutral, salted ground that makes the pairing read as one bite.
The craft is the bread warm, the figs ripe, and the proportion exact. The pizza bianca is split while it still holds oven warmth, because the warm crumb softens slightly against the cool figs and takes the fat without going greasy, and the cut faces are sometimes pressed lightly so the airy structure compacts enough to hold the filling rather than shedding it. The figs are used dead ripe and split or torn rather than sliced thin, so they keep their soft flesh and release their syrup into the crumb instead of drying out. The salt element, draped prosciutto with its cured fat or a smear of soft fresh cheese, is kept thin and even, because the point is a counterweight to the sugar, not a second loud flavour, and a heavy hand buries the figs the bread was opened for. A good build is sweet, salt, and oily in balance and eaten while the bread is still fresh; a sloppy one uses underripe figs and a cold dense crust and the contrast never arrives.
The variations are the one-element swaps and the close Roman cousins, each its own build. There is the version with stracciatella or another soft cheese in place of the cured meat, the build that adds a few rocket leaves for a bitter edge against the sweet, the autumn relative that swaps figs for grapes on the same split flatbread, and the plain oiled pizza bianca used as a bread on its own. Each of those is the same sweet-against-salt idea with one decision changed, and each deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here.