Panino con Verdure Grigliate
Grilled vegetables (zucchini, eggplant, peppers) on bread with olive oil.
Grilled vegetables (zucchini, eggplant, peppers) on bread with olive oil.
Ventricina (spreadable or sliceable salami with sweet and hot peppers); varies by area—soft in Abruzzo, firmer in Molise.
Ventricina from Vasto; sliceable, with large pork pieces visible.
Soft, spreadable ventricina from Teramo province.
Very fresh, unsalted sheep's cheese; the first stage of pecorino-making.
Tuna (usually canned, in olive oil) on bread.
Tuna with white cannellini beans, olive oil, and onion; Tuscan salad as sandwich.
Cured whole-cut Favignana bluefin, not flaked: ventresca belly or firmer tarantello on plain bread under its own packing oil, from the fixed-net tonnara this Sicilian island once ran every spring.
Toma Piemontese DOP (semi-hard cow's milk cheese); varies from mild to sharp with age.
Head cheese (coppa di testa) Ligurian style on bread.
Alba's carne cruda all'albese given a roll: knife-cut raw Fassona piemontese, the double-muscled Langhe breed lean enough to eat raw, dressed at the last second with oil, lemon.
Taralli (ring-shaped savory crackers) sometimes crushed on sandwiches for crunch; or eaten alongside.
Taleggio DOP (washed-rind, soft, pungent, creamy cheese from Val Taleggio); strong aroma, mild taste.
A whole supplì set into bread: the Roman fried rice croquette, cooked in tomato and ragù around a mozzarella core that pulls into a long telephone-cord string. Starch inside starch.
Apple strudel as sweet sandwich filling; unusual but possible.
Stracciatella (shredded mozzarella in cream, burrata's interior) on bread.
Cool stracciatella, the cream-loosened curd from inside a burrata, against two or three whole salt-cured anchovies on grilled ciabatta. Milk meeting brine, two finished things on one piece of bread.
Stracchino/crescenza (soft, spreadable, mild cheese) on bread.
Lamb or kid intestine wound tight around a spring onion, charred over open charcoal by a stigghiularu, then packed into a plain roll with salt, pepper, and lemon.
Sauris is the highest village in Friuli, and its speck is smoked over beechwood only -- no juniper, no piney bite. The panino is built to keep that clean, sweet smoke audible.
Speck Alto Adige PGI on dark rye: pork leg dry-cured with juniper and bay, then cold-smoked below 20 degrees over beech. Firm, resinous, alpine, and nothing like a soft prosciutto.
Soprassata toscana is a cooked pork head cheese, not the southern salame its near-twin name suggests: a jellied terrine sliced thick onto saltless Tuscan bread.
Soppressata is one word for a dozen pressed salami, so the panino changes its meat at every regional line: Calabrian chilli, Lucano fennel, soft Veneto consa. The press is the only constant.
Soppressata molisana is Molise's pressed pork salame, lean cuts wiped with orange peel before curing, sliced thin onto a plain country roll. Even-tempered, citrus under the pepper.