Tigelle con pesto modenese is the version named for the dressing in its full local form, where the lard is pounded with garlic, rosemary, and Parmigiano into a proper paste rather than only melted in. The tigella, properly the crescentina, is a small leavened disc cooked between the patterned plates of a tigelliera until pale and faintly freckled, then split warm along its equator. Pesto modenese is the worked emulsion of pork lard, raw garlic, fresh rosemary, and grated Parmigiano, mashed together until it is a smooth, sharp, savoury cream rather than loose fat. Smeared into the hot seam it softens, the cheese carrying salt and umami while the garlic and rosemary bloom in the warm fat. The disc needs that loaded paste to lift it past plain bread, and the pesto needs the bread's heat and faint chew to keep an intense, fatty, garlicky cream from being overwhelming on its own. The completeness is the point: cheese, fat, herb, and allium all already inside one smear.
The craft is in the pounding and the balance. This is a richer, sharper dressing than plain melted lardo and more assertive than a lean cunza, so the proportions matter: enough Parmigiano to give it backbone and salt, enough rosemary and garlic to perfume it without turning acrid, and lard clean enough to bind the rest without tasting of nothing but fat. It must be pounded to a paste, not chopped, so no bite lands on a raw garlic shard or a dry needle of rosemary. The disc has to be hot so the cheese and fat slacken together; a cold tigella leaves the paste stiff and the flavours locked. A good build spreads it thin and even and often stops there, since the pesto is self-sufficient. A sloppy one over-garlics it, under-cheeses it into mere seasoned lard, or applies so much that the seam weeps.
The variations are the same warm split disc met by a different filling, each its own article. There is the leaner cunza without the Parmigiano, the disc with whole thin-sliced lardo instead of a paste, the version with prosciutto laid over the dressing, and the loaded salumi misti build. The same pesto modenese is also smeared into warm gnocco fritto, a fried dough carrier rather than a pressed disc. Each changes one element while the iron and the seam stay fixed, and each deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here.