Today, our alarm will ring long before sunrise for one of the most authentic and unusual photographic experiences of the journey: a visit to the charcoal makers of Serra San Bruno. This is not a demonstration staged for visitors, but a working tradition that still survives deep in the Calabrian mountains, largely unknown even to many people from Calabria itself. We will have the rare opportunity to enter this world while the charcoal makers are at work, observing and photographing a process that has changed remarkably little over generations.

The charcoal makers of these mountains are the custodians of an ancient craft, passed down from generation to generation since the time of the Carthusian monks. Their work consists of transforming beech and fir wood from the surrounding forests into charcoal through a slow and demanding pre-industrial process. Rather than simply burning the wood, the technique relies on carbonization with very little oxygen. The charcoal makers build the scarazzi by hand: monumental geometric mounds made from carefully stacked logs, then sealed beneath a thick layer of leaves and damp earth. Once the fire is lit through an opening at the top, the structure must be watched day and night for more than a week, with the airflow carefully controlled through small holes in the earth so that the mound continues to smolder without ever catching fire.

We venture deep into the forest in the middle of the night, reaching the production sites while darkness is still complete. Here, the air immediately becomes thick with the pungent smell of smoke and slowly burning wood. In the pitch-black forest, the only natural sources of light will be the reddish glow filtering through the openings in the scarazzi.

For photographers, the atmosphere is extraordinarily dramatic. We watch the dark silhouettes of the charcoal makers moving against dense clouds of white smoke rising from the mounds. Before dawn, as the first blue light begins to filter through the branches, the visual contrast becomes exceptional. We photograph faces marked by hard work and soot, illuminated by the beams of our torches or by the glow of burning embers. The rhythmic sound of shovels, the steam rising as water is thrown onto the hot charcoal, and shafts of light cutting through the smoke will give us the opportunity to create powerful images documenting an ancient craft that has survived largely unchanged.

Once our sunrise session is over, we return to the hotel for a well-earned breakfast and a change of clothes before continuing toward the southern end of Calabria. We leave the Serre behind and descend toward the coast, heading for Reggio Calabria. After checking into our hotel and taking some time to freshen up, in the late afternoon we travel south to one of the most remarkable landscapes of the Grecanica area: the ghost village of Pentedattilo.

Pentedattilo appears almost unreal, perched beneath a rocky formation resembling a gigantic hand of stone. The village takes its name from the Greek words penta and daktylos—“five fingers”—and lies at the foot of Monte Calvario, a sandstone monolith sculpted by erosion into the shape of an open hand reaching toward the sky, seemingly holding a cluster of abandoned houses in its palm. Almost entirely uninhabited since the 1970s, this suspended place retains a haunting and magnetic beauty, made even more evocative by the dark legends that have surrounded it for centuries.

At sunset, warm light illuminates the stone houses and the amphitheater of sandstone pinnacles, transforming an already surreal and unique landscape into one of the most iconic scenes of our journey.

Overnight in Reggio Calabria.