The schiacciata fiorentina con prosciutto is the Florentine oiled flatbread carried into a sandwich by a single draped meat. Schiacciata fiorentina is the city's low leavened bread, dough pressed out flat, dimpled deep, rubbed generously with olive oil and salt, and baked until the top is gold and faintly crisp while the inside stays soft, open, and oil-slicked. Prosciutto crudo, the air-dried Tuscan or Parma ham, is sliced to a near-translucent drape and folded loosely between the split halves. The defining fact is the partnership between an oily, mildly salted bread and a silken, slow-cured meat: the schiacciata's soft crumb and surface oil give the ham a yielding surface to fold against, and the prosciutto's fine fat and salt give the otherwise plain flatbread its whole point. Without the prosciutto the schiacciata is bare oiled bread; without the soft oiled crumb the ham has nothing to set off its salt and fat. The two are matched so a quiet flatbread lets a delicate cured ham read.
The craft is in the bread's oil, the warmth, and the loose fold. The schiacciata is best same-day and ideally still faintly warm, split horizontally so the two oil-soaked faces meet the meat and the crumb is soft enough to compress slightly and hold the fill rather than shedding it. The prosciutto is sliced as thin as it will hold together and laid in lifted, loose folds, never pressed flat, because crushed ham turns waxy and the bite goes heavy and the salt sharp. A moderate amount is right: the bite should be soft oiled bread, then a slack ribbon of ham, then bread again. Nothing wet is added and no sauce is needed, since the salt, the fine fat, and the sweetness all come from the cure, with the bread's own oil the only fat. A sloppy build uses a cold dense slab and a thick stacked layer that reads as one salty mouthful; a good one is soft, oiled, and loosely filled, balanced so the gentle flatbread and the silken ham add up.
The close cousins stay in the Tuscan oiled-bread habit, each its own subject rather than a footnote here. There is the schiacciata con finocchiona on fennel salame, the schiacciata con salame toscano on the plain pepper salame, the fettunta con prosciutto on the grilled garlic-rubbed slice instead of the flatbread, and the schiacciata con mortadella on cooked sausage. Each is the same oiled-flatbread-meets-cured-pork idea with one element changed, and each deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here.