It’s a rainy, dark December morning in the mountains of Calabria, southern Italy, and Nazareno Scrivo has arrived for work. He’s stressed. “Bad weather for making charcoal,” he says tersely, pointing through the trees to a ruined batch, going up in flames like a bonfire.
Nazareno has come up here before sunrise, while his sons catch a couple more hours of sleep back at home, to keep an eye on the vast charcoal mounds called scarazzi—if rain washes away the earth piled on top, the slow-burning wood beneath will be exposed to the air, swiftly turning the whole batch to ash. “Winter is horrible,” he says, grabbing his spade and disappearing into the darkness. “Brutto.”
That grim morning, Josh Hughes, my friend and co-director, and I arrived with our camera, making a film about Nazareno and his fellow charcoal makers, known in southern Italy as carbonai. We first became …