The Sandwich Figatellu is really two sandwiches wearing one name, and the fork in the road is whether the sausage met fire or air. Figatellu is a Corsican pork sausage built around liver, garlic, and pepper, and it travels through two states. Fresh, it is a sausage to cook. Aged, it is a sausage to slice. The bread is the same crusted loaf either way, but everything else about the sandwich, its texture, its temperature, its restraint, is dictated by which figatellu the cook reached for. The liver-and-smoke character that defines the meat is treated in the companion piece, Sandwich au Figatellu; the question here is what the two preparations do to the sandwich around it.
Take the grilled build first. Fresh figatellu is set over wood embers until the casing blackens and splits and the fat runs, then laid hot into split bread so the loaf drinks the rendered fat and the smoke off the grill. This is the hot, messy, fairground version: the bread has to be sturdy enough to take running fat without going to paste, and the sandwich is best within minutes, while the casing still has snap and the crumb is warm rather than soaked through. Grilled onions belong here, their sweetness answering the char. The cured build is the opposite discipline. Dried figatellu is sliced thin and eaten cold off the sausage, no heat at all, the way a saucisson sandwich is built: good crust, a little butter to bridge the salt to the wheat, a single sharp note to cut the iron. Thin slicing is non-negotiable on this side, because at full thickness the dried liver turns into a wall.
Both are Corsican before they are anything else, and the choice is really a choice of occasion: the grill for eating on the spot, the cure for carrying.
Variations move along the island's curing shelf rather than off it: lonzu, the lean cured loin, or coppa, the marbled neck, each milder than figatellu and each happy on the same bread. The Sandwich Figatellu belongs with the cured and grilled sausage builds the catalog groups under Sandwich Saucisson & Charcuterie. Its specific contribution there is the split itself: one sausage that becomes a different sandwich depending on whether it is grilled fresh or sliced dry.