Panino Tonno e Fagioli
Tuna with white beans, olive oil, onion; Tuscan classic.
Tuna with white beans, olive oil, onion; Tuscan classic.
Tuna (usually canned, in olive oil) on bread.
Tuna with white cannellini beans, olive oil, and onion; Tuscan salad as sandwich.
Tuna from the Favignana mattanza (traditional tuna hunt); premium quality.
Fried sardines cured cold in a sweet-sour tangle of vinegared onions, raisins, and pine nuts, drained onto a crusted Venetian roll and eaten as a bàcaro cicchetto.
Palermo's sarde a beccafico in bread: sardines butterflied, stuffed with toasted breadcrumb, pine nuts and currants, rolled tail-up to mimic a roasted songbird, and baked with bay.
The panino con bottarga turns cured fish roe into a sandwich by treating it as a seasoning: grey-mullet bottarga shaved to translucent slivers over oil and bread, a little carrying a long way.
The Sardinian two-ingredient panino: cold butter spread thick on a plain country loaf, with bottarga di muggine shaved fine over it. The butter is the design.
Thick whole-wheat bigoli in a slow onion-anchovy salsa, spooned into a crusty roll. A Venetian fasting-day pasta turned into a frank carb-on-carb sandwich.
Baccalà mantecato is air-dried cod soaked for days, poached, and beaten with olive oil into a pale, airy cloud, spread thick on grilled bread: a Venetian cicchetto that eats like whipped sea butter.
Monterosso anchovies (salted or marinated) on bread; the Cinque Terre anchovy capital.
A salt-cured anchovy is almost too strong to eat plain, so a raw parsley, garlic, and caper green sauce dressed onto the fillet does the seasoning. The Piedmontese anchovy-in-salsa-verde roll.