Puccia con capocollo is the Salentine round-bread sandwich at its most direct: a soft Puglian puccia split and filled with slices of cured capocollo. What defines it is the partnership between a plain, slightly chewy wheat roll and a richly marbled, well-spiced pork neck cut. The puccia is a flattish round of bread baked from a simple dough, tender inside with a thin crust and very little seasoning of its own; the capocollo, in the Salento often the Martina Franca style, is a whole muscle cured with wine, pepper, and a faint smoke, fatty in fine veins rather than in slabs. The neutral bread exists to frame the meat: it absorbs the rendered fat, calms the spice, and gives the soft cured pork something to push against. Without the capocollo the puccia is a plain roll; without the bread the capocollo has nothing to carry its fat and salt. The two are matched so a quiet bread lets an assertive salume read clearly.
Making it well begins with the bread's condition. The puccia is best used soft and fresh, split through with a wide pocket so the slices lie flat and the thin crust does not shatter the fill. The capocollo is sliced thin enough to be supple, because thick slices turn the fat waxy and the pepper harsh, and it is folded loosely into the pocket rather than stacked dense so the bread can close and the fat spreads thin across the bite. Salt and spice come entirely from the meat, so the build stays clean, sometimes only a thread of oil, never a sauce that would muddy the cure. A sloppy version uses stale tight bread and a thick salty stack that reads as one greasy note; a good one is soft, generously but loosely filled, and balanced so the gentle bread and the spiced pork add up rather than fight.
The close cousins sit inside the same puccia family and each is its own subject rather than a footnote here. There is the puccia con carne di cavallo built on horse meat instead of pork, the all-vegetable puccia con verdure, the version with local capocollo against a few sun-dried tomatoes and a leaf of rocket, and the uliata studded with black olives in the dough under the same meat. Each is the same plain-round-bread-meets-filling idea with one element changed, and each deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here.