MIAMI, Sept. 3, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Two cruise line brands from Carnival Corporation, the world's largest cruise company, have announced plans to resume sailing operations, with Italy-based Costa Cruises scheduled to restart sailing in Italy this Sunday, Sept. 6, followed by Germany-based AIDA Cruises scheduled to resume on Nov. 1. 

The brands will begin in a gradual, phased-in manner with six initial ships and limited itineraries, becoming the first two of the company's nine global cruise line brands to resume operations. The initial cruises will take place with adjusted passenger capacity and enhanced health protocols developed with government and health authorities to follow shoreside mitigation guidelines.

Costa Cruises is restarting sailing with two initial ships departing from Italian ports beginning Sept. 6. Costa Deliziosa will offer weekly cruises from Trieste on Sept. 6, 13, 20 and 27, visiting five destinations in southern Italy, including Bari and Brindisi in Puglia, Corigliano-Rossano in Calabria, and Siracusa and Catania in Sicily. Costa Diadema will follow on Sept. 19 from Genoa, calling at Italian ports in the western Mediterranean, including Civitavecchia/Rome, Naples, Palermo, Cagliari and La Spezia. The one-week itineraries are being reserved exclusively for Italian guests.

AIDA Cruises will resume its cruise operations with two of its ships, sailing from the Canary Islands in November 2020, followed by an additional two ships departing from the western Mediterranean and United Arab Emirates beginning in December 2020. The first of the brand's cruises is set to begin Nov. 1, with seven-day voyages to and departures from Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, with AIDAmar, followed by sailings from Las Palmas and Santa Cruz de Tenerife with AIDAperla on Nov. 7. In December, AIDA Cruises will resume sailing operations in the Western Mediterranean with AIDAstella departing on seven-day cruises from Palma, Mallorca, beginning Dec. 12. Additionally, AIDAprima will offer seven-day cruises from Dubai starting Dec. 11 and from Abu Dhabi beginning Dec. 15.

In working with global and national health authorities and medical experts, Costa Cruises and AIDA Cruises have developed a comprehensive set of health and hygiene protocols to help facilitate a safe, healthy return to cruise vacations. Both brands are providing guests with detailed information about enhanced restart protocols, which will continue to be modeled after shoreside health and mitigation guidelines as defined by each brand's respective county, and approved by the flag state, Italy. Protocols will be updated based on evolving scientific and medical knowledge related to mitigation strategies.

Costa Cruises has developed the Costa Safety Protocol for its fleet, including new operating procedures supported by independent scientific experts in public health and consistent with the health protocols defined by the Italian Government and European authorities. The comprehensive set of measures and procedures cover key areas such as crew health and safety, the booking process, guest activities, entertainment and dining, and medical care on board, as well as pre-boarding, embarking and disembarking operations, which will include testing for all guests prior to embarkation. Additional information on the Costa Safety Protocol is available here.

"Our highest responsibilities and top priorities are always compliance, protecting the environment, and the health, safety and well-being of our guests, the communities we visit and our crew," said Arnold Donald, CEO of Carnival Corporation. "We are engaged with a large number of medical experts and scientists around the world, and they are providing us with extremely valuable insight that we are using to develop new and enhanced protocols that are in the best interest of our guests, crew and overall public health. In areas of the world where community spread is largely mitigated and authorities are supportive of a gradual return to service over time, we look forward to again welcoming guests on board."

More broadly, as the understanding of COVID-19 continues to evolve, Carnival Corporation has been working with a number of world-leading public health, epidemiological and policy experts to support its ongoing efforts for developing enhanced protocols and procedures for the return of cruise vacations. Among the experts are:

Dr. Simon Clarke, associate professor in cellular microbiology, University of Reading School of Biological Sciences (UK) 

Michael S. Diamond, MD, PhD, Herbert S. Gasser professor of medicine, molecular microbiology, pathology & immunology; and associate director, Center for Human Immunology and Immunotherapy Programs, Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis

Michael Z. Lin, MD, PhD, associate professor of neurobiology, bioengineering, and chemical and systems biology; and principal investigator, The Lin Lab, Stanford University School of Medicine 

Dr. Jewel Mullen, MD, MPH, associate dean for health equity, University of Texas at Austin, Dell Medical School 

Emil C. Reisinger, MD, full professor of internal medicine, infectious diseases and tropical medicine and director of the Division of Tropical Medicine and Infectious Diseases, Department of Internal Medicine, University of Rostock, Germany

Dr. Stefano Vella, MD, former director, National Center for Global Health, Istituto Superiore di Sanità (Italian National Institute of Health); and adjunct professor of global health, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Catholic University of the Sacred Heart) in Rome

These advisors and others have been working with the company and its brands to review existing and enhanced procedures and provide supplemental advice based on the latest scientific evidence and best practices for protection and mitigation.

________________________________________

SOURCE: PRNewswire/Carnival Corporation & plc (September 3, 2020)

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A Frenchman was escorted off a cruise in the Indian Ocean after staging multiple protests against the captain and crew.

According to The Telegraph, 53-year-old Alain Jan and some other passengers aboard Costa Cruises' Costa neoRiviera became upset after several planned stops were canceled due to the threat of bubonic and pneumonic plague outbreak in Madagascar last month.

The Washington Post reported the outbreak has infected about 1,800 people and killed at least 127 others in the African nation.

"We said OK, it's for health reasons and anyway there were two other excursions left in Nosy Be and Diego Suarez," Jan told French newspaper, Le Parisien.

However, passengers learned later on that two other stops would be canceled. The cruise line compensated them with $175 to spend onboard the ship.

"That evening, we organized a protest in the restaurant. There were 60 of us banging our fists on the table to alert other cruise passengers to this con job," said Jan.

Passengers staged a second protest in the ship's theater before the captain alerted local police in the Seychelles.

Jan and his wife were escorted off of the ship for making "violent protests" and "disturbing the cruise." They spent two nights in a hotel in the Seychelles before flying home. Costa Cruises paid for the couple's flight.

"That's how I was freed from the floating prison," Jan said.

Costa Cruises defended its decision to cancel the three Madagascar stops as well as two others in Nosy Be and Diego Suarez.

"The company made every effort to maintain the stop-offs on Madagascar, looking into all the alternatives," the cruise line said in a statement, adding that "security, health and well-being of passengers and crew are an absolute priority."

"Given the delays that [quarantine] would have created, and even longer ones if there were any suspect cases on board, and considering that passengers were already on board, the company was forced to restrict its trip to the Seychelles and Reunion."

Passengers have been reimbursed for canceled excursions in Madagascar and those traveling on future sailings have been informed of the itinerary changes.

Earlier this month, Costa Cruises was awarded the best Mediterranean itineraries in the industry by Porthole Cruise Magazine readers.

Costa Cruises has announced plans to build the “next generation” of cruise ship, placing an order for what will be the two largest passenger vessels in the world based on total capacity.

With over 2,600 guest cabins apiece, each ship will be able to accommodate up to 6,600 passengers. This is around 300 more than the current record-holder, Royal Caribbean’s Allure of the Seas, which has a maximum guest capacity of 6,296.

The new additions to the Costa fleet will also be the most environmentally friendly cruise ships ever built, it claims. In an effort to drastically reduce exhaust emissions, both will carry Liquefied Natural Gas to power the dual-powered hybrid engines, the first ever cruise ships to do so.

They will rely solely on the natural gas (a relatively clean-burning fuel), instead of the combination of gas turbines and diesel that most cruise ships use, thus cutting down dramatically on carbon emissions.

“The two Costa ships are a real innovation for the market, setting new standards for the whole industry,” says Neil Palomba, President of Costa Cruises. “The order also confirms that the Costa brand will continue to grow, becoming even stronger and keep on generating a positive economic impact in the main countries where it operates, including Italy.”

Mr Palomba further iterated that the new ships will be an expression of the Costa's new positioning, "Italy's finest", drawing on the company's national heritage to further define its brand. According to the press release, Italian "style, hospitality, gastronomy and entertainment” will be central to the passenger experience, while Costa expects to hire approximately 750 Italian crewmembers.

The two new ships, each exceeding 180,000 gross tons, will be built by Meyer shipyard in Turku, Finland, and are expected to be completed in 2019 and 2020.

They form part of a larger, multibillion dollar contract between Carnival Corporation (of which Costa is a subsidiary) and several major European shipyards for nine new ships between 2019 and 2022.

Costa’s German brand, Aida Cruises, will also gain two new ships as part of the deal.

By Tom Mulvihill, The Telegraph

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Costa Cruises will beef up its presence in Miami next winter with a second ship, the company today announced at the annual Cruise Shipping Miami conference.

Costa said the 2,114-passenger Costa Mediterranea will operate seven-night sailings out of the city, joining the 2,260-passenger Costa Luminosa, which will be back with 10-night itineraries.

The deployment marks the first time since 2009 that the line will have two ships sailing from the Florida cruise hub. The addition of a second ship represents a nearly 94% increase in capacity for the line out of the port.

Costa Mediterranea will begin sailing from Miami on Dec. 12, while Costa Luminosa starts its Miami season on Dec. 20.

The Costa Luminosa's 10-night itineraries will features stops at Nassau or Freeport, Bahamas; Grand Turk, Turks and Caicos; or Princess Cay; Ocho Rios, Jamaica; Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands; Roatan, Honduras; and Cozumel, Mexico.

Details about Costa Mediterranea's seven-day itineraries are being finalized and will be announced at a later date.

By Gene Sloan, USA Today

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The captain of the cruise ship whose crash claimed 32 lives tells The Daily Beast that he is being thrown under the bus by Carnival Cruise Lines in order to secure an insurance windfall.

Francesco Schettino, the erstwhile captain of the ill-fated Costa Concordia cruise ship that crashed off the shores of Giglio island in January 2013, says he alone is being blamed for the accident so Costa and its parent company, Carnival, can collect insurance money for the wrecked vessel. The insurance payout for the wreck is expected to top $2 billion according to Lloyds of London and Munich Reinsurers, which have issued cost-study reports on the disaster.

“Since the beginning, they have searched for a way to put all the blame on me, saying the captain went crazy for a moment, not to forfeit the insurance money,” Schettino told The Daily Beast in an exclusive interview in the courthouse in Grosseto on Tuesday. “It didn’t take long to figure out that it would all be better if the responsibility rested with just one person rather than the whole company.”

The former head of Costa Cruiselines, Pier Luigi Foschi, testified as a prosecution witness at the trial on Monday, telling the court that neither Costa nor Carnival bear any responsibility whatsoever for the captain’s errant actions before, during or after the disaster. “The company is not responsible for what happens on board the ship,” Foschi told the court. “For us, the ship should have never been in that place at that time on that night. We entrust the ship captain with full responsibility for the ships.”

Schettino is facing charges of multiple manslaughter, abandoning ship and causing a maritime disaster in the accident that killed 32 people and injured dozens more. Five Costa Cruise officials have already pled guilty to manslaughter for negligence in the accident, including two witnesses who failed to show up at Tuesday’s hearing. Manrico Giampedroni, who was the ship’s hotel director, spent more than 48 hours trapped in a half-submerged restaurant, staying awake by drinking Coca Cola from cans that floated by. He pled guilty to manslaughter charges and received a two-and-a-half-year sentence. He did not attend Tuesday’s hearing because Costa has redeployed him on a new cruise ship and he won’t be back on shore until April 11.

The ship’s helmsman Jacob Rusli Bin, who also pled guilty to manslaughter in exchange for a sentence of one year and eight months, also failed to answer a subpoena to testify. He was “unreachable” and believed to be living in Jakarta, Indonesia, according to the Grosseto court clerk. Maria Navarro, one of Schettino’sdefense lawyers hypothesized that the helmsman, whom Schettino says misinterpreted his orders and turned the ship the wrong way when it hit the rocks off Giglio, “might actually be in a psychiatric hospital.” The two are rescheduled to testify in April.

“Most likely Costa is forcing them to stay away from the trial as part of a conspiracy to blame me,” Schettino told The Daily Beast. “They will say and do anything not to blame the whole team because if the whole team is found ultimately responsible, it reflects negatively on the cruiseship management, which would impact the insurance payout.”

Schettino maintains that while he made the first fatal error to take the Concordia off course to do a fly-by salute near Giglio, the events that followed were those that contributed to the loss of life. His defense team has argued in court that the ship’s watertight doors and emergency generators malfunctioned and that had the ship functioned properly, he would have been able to navigate it to a safer place for evacuation. He also says that the decision to delay the evacuation was a team decision, not his alone. Based on phone records from Schettino’s private cellphone filed in court, the captain was on the phone at least a dozen times to Roberto Ferrarini, head of Costa’s crisis unit in Genova, between the moment of impact and the call to abandon ship. Ferrarini, who will testify on April 14, also took a plea bargain, pleading guilty to manslaughter in exchange for a sentence of two years and 10 months.

Schettino reportedly asked Ferrarini about getting a tugboat and some helicopters to avoid having tomake the ‘abandon ship’ call, which automatically triggers a refund for passenger tickets. Schettino told The Daily Beast he is the scapegoat for Costa and its parent company Carnival. “They were all there, but it is apparently better to just blame me when the whole team is responsible. I was only there for the last three minutes,” he said, referring to his physical presence on the bridge just as the Concordia clipped the rocks off Giglio. “This is a conspiracy to convict the captain when the core team made the erroneous decisions together.”

Costa, which maintains that the insurance payout will not cover the cost of the salvage operation and returning the island of Giglio to its previous state, says the captain is desperate and lashing out. "This is has been his defense all along," Luciano Luffarelli, spokesperson for Costa Cruisellines who attended court on Tuesday told The Daily Beast. "But it is indisputable that the captain is the only person responsible for the ship."

On February 27, Schettino accompanied the three-judge panel and a group of maritime experts as they toured the half-sunken ship which was uprighted in a spectacular maneuver last September. “It was one of the most important, wonderful experiences I have ever had,” he told The Daily Beast. “Getting back on that ship was one of the best things I have ever done in my life, because it will help us find the truth.”

At Tuesday’s court session, the prosecutor announced that he was launching an investigation into photos Schettino allegedly took with his cellphone while onboard the vessel on February 27. Schettino’s defense contends that the photos were taken to help their own experts determine the ship’s condition. The judge referred the case to another court.

The next hearing will be April 14 and the prosecution is expected to wrap up their case by the end of April. There will be further sessions in May, which may include testimony from Schettino, but the court will then be forced to take a break in June when the theater where the hearings are being held to accommodate all of the civil parties and passengers has been booked for a dance festival. Schettino says he is philosophical about the future. He says he doesn’t know if he will ever return to the sea as a navigator, but he won’t rule it out. “We will see.

In life sometimes we have to reinvent ourselves and find new directions and vocations. I’m not worried about myself. We are fighting a giant and hopefully the truth will prevail,” he told The Daily Beast. When asked if he was worried about going to prison for 20 years or more, he said no. “As they say, the sea makes a man stronger.”

By Barbie Latza Nadeau, The Daily Beast

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The captain of the Costa Concordia, Francesco Schettino, went back on board on Thursday for the first time since the huge cruise liner sank with the loss of 32 lives just over two years ago, accompanying experts investigating the capsize.

The twisted wreck of the 1,000-foot-long ship, now stabilized after a complex salvage operation last year, sits propped up on underwater platforms just outside the port of Giglio, the island off the Tuscan coast where it capsized on January 13, 2012.

Schettino, who faces multiple charges including manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning ship, went aboard the vessel with a expert team appointed by the court but is only present as a defendant and is taking no active part in the investigation.

Residents of Giglio, a tiny island that lives off tourism, are impatient to see the wreck towed away and reaction to Schettino's visit was largely "indifferent", the mayor of Giglio, Sergio Ortelli said.

"I don't why he wanted to come here, maybe to see things," said Ariento Italo, a resident. "I just don't know what he is going to do - he will see things that he already knows and anyway everything is all smashed up."

However, his lawyers say the investigation will be able to ascertain whether the ship's equipment was working correctly or whether malfunctions caused the incident or worsened conditions during the chaotic nighttime evacuation of the ship.

"We've been asking for these checks for two years," said Domenico Pepe, one of Schettino's defense team. "If the generator had worked properly nothing would have happened. Without the generator, the rudder, the lights, the doors, the pumps and the lifeboats didn't work."

It is the first time Schettino has been aboard since the 114,500-ton Concordia, carrying 4,229 passengers and crew, struck a reef while performing a display maneuver in which it came close to shore to "salute" the port.

Stripped of his maritime licence, Schettino is the only person on trial after four crew members and an official of the ship operator Costa Cruises were sentenced to terms of up to 34 months in prison after pleading guilty last year.

He has admitted that he bears responsibility for the accident as the ship's captain. But he says that he is not the only person to blame and has pushed for the vessel to be examined for evidence of possible technical faults.

However the investigation has already been clouded by allegations that two officials of the ship's owners, Costa Cruises boarded the wreck without authorization. A separate probe has been opened into the two.

By Reuters

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Costa Cruises has launched “MyCosta Mobile,” a new application for smartphones and tablets that enables Costa guests to call and phone each other while cruising onboard its 14 ships with unlimited talk and text at no cost.

The user-friendly MyCosta Mobile is free to download and register. Before their cruise, guests simply download the application from the Apple, Android or Google Play store and install it on their smartphone or tablet. Once onboard, guests connect to the ship’s Wi-Fi network, register and launch the app.

By accessing the application via the ship’s Wi-Fi system, guests can socialize with other guests on their ship by phone or text through the closed network at no charge. The app also can be used to contact a stateroom or one of the ship’s restaurants, spa desk, shore excursion office and more.

If a guest uses the mobile device to access the Web or contact someone not on the ship, then the customary roaming and shipboard Internet-access charges apply.

MyCosta Mobile is available for the iOS 5.0 operating system and newer versions of iPhones and iPads, as well as for smartphones and tablets that run on Android 2.3 and later mobile-operating systems.

The application comes in six languages: Italian, English, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese.

By Costa Cruises

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The Costa Concordia cruise ship wreck will be removed in June from its watery graveyard off Tuscany and taken to a port to be dismantled, the final phase of an unprecedented 600 million-euro ($817 million) salvage effort.

At a news conference Friday, Italy's civil protection chief and Costa Crociere officials gave the timetable and the rundown of what was needed for the ship to be refloated. They spoke just days before the second anniversary of the ship's Jan. 13, 2012, grounding that killed 32 people.

A handful of Italian ports — including Piombino, Genoa, Palermo and Civitavecchia — are bidding to take in the wreck and dismantle it for scrap. Ports in France, Turkey, Britain and even China are also bidding for the job.

Italy's environment minister, Andrea Orlando, and the head of Costa Crociere SpA, Michael Thamm, said the preference was to keep the project in Italy, both to limit potential environmental damage while the hobbled ship is in transit and to keep any economic benefits at home.

A decision on the winning bid is expected in March, they said.

The Concordia slammed into a reef off the island of Giglio when its captain took it off course in an apparent stunt to bring it closer to the island. With a 70-meter (230-foot) gash in its hull, the ship listed for an hour and finally capsized off Giglio's port.

Capt. Francesco Schettino is currently on trial for alleged manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning the ship before all the passengers had been evacuated. He says he is innocent and that he saved lives with the ship's final maneuvers.

In a remarkable 19-hour engineering feat, salvage operators in September righted the Concordia from its side and brought it to rest upright on a false seabed. Since then, crews have stabilized the giant ship and prepared its heavily damaged starboard side, which had borne the weight of the ship against underwater rocks, to be outfitted with giant tanks that will help float it.

The 15 tanks, which will mirror 15 other tanks on the port side, will likely be affixed in April amid calmer seas and better weather, said Franco Porcellacchia, Costa's project manager. The tanks will be filled with water, and then gradually emptied to provide the buoyancy needed to float the ship off the seabed.

That timetable should allow the wreck to be towed away sometime in June, said Franco Gabrielli, Italy's civil protection chief who has been overseeing the salvage operation.

That would come before another summer tourist season gets into full swing on Giglio, a pristine island in a marine sanctuary that has had the shipwreck on its horizon for two years.

Gabrielli said it was possible the damaged cruise ship might have to spend time in a temporary port before heading to its final destination for dismantling, but the hope was to move it all at once.

Not every port can accommodate such a huge wreck. The winning port must not only have the facilities to dismantle and recycle the ship, it must also have an unusually deep harbor: The 300-meter-long (1,000-foot-long) Concordia normally sailed with 8 meters (26 feet) of hull under water. But because of the damage when it ran aground, the Concordia will limp into its final port of call with 18.5 meters (61 feet) of hull submerged.

Costa is a unit of Miami-based Carnival Corp., the world's largest cruise line operator. Costa estimates the salvage effort has pumped an estimated 261 million euros ($355 million) into the Italian economy.

By Nicole Winfield, Associated Press

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South Floridians now have a new option for experiencing Costa Cruises unique brand of Italian-style cruising.

Earlier this month, the Genoa, Italy-based cruise line deployed its 2,260-passenger Costa Luminosa cruise ship to South Florida, making it the line's newest and largest ship ever to sail from Miami.

Dubbed "The Ship of Light," Luminosa is sailing seasonal 10-day Caribbean voyages from PortMiami, with six stops scheduled at ports in the Bahamas, Jamaica, Cayman Islands and Mexico, and other destinations.

The Miami departures will offer cruisers "a taste of Italy in the tropics," said Scott Knutson, vice president of sales and marketing for Costa's North American operations during a ship tour Tuesday.

"We don't want to Americanize the product as we have other sister brands that offer that experience," Knutson said. "It's a completely international experience and we have nationalities from all over the world [aboard]."

Costa is a unit of Miami-based Carnival Corp. & PLC, whose 10 cruise brands also include namesake Carnival Cruise Lines, Holland America Line, Princess Cruises, Seabourn and Cunard.

Luminosa entered service in 2009 and its features and amenities include three pools, four restaurants, 11 bars, a 4D cinema, spa and casino. Sixty-eight percent of its 1,130 cabins have a private balcony — the highest percentage across Costa's fleet.

The ship's decor and interior design are unapologetically Italian-themed, such as the "Reclining Woman 2004" sculpture by artist Fernando Botero in the ship's atrium. Similar accents can be found in other works of art around the ship.

Menus in restaurants are also Italian-focused, although international fare is available.

"It helps to see the cabins, see the ship [layout], and taste the food to better understand what it has to offer," said Mari Zammit, an independent cruise consultant for Delray Beach-based iCruise.com who toured the ship Tuesday. "Today [cruising] is more about the ship and less about the destination."

While Costa typically attracts an international audience, about 900 guests from North America sailed on its Dec. 17 departure, the result of a "big Christmas" marketing push, Knutson said. By comparison, last week's sailing had about 280 North Americans.

Cruise sales for the 65-year-old Italian cruise company took a hit after its Costa Concordia cruise ship ran aground Jan. 13, 2012, in waters off Giglio Island, Italy, after hitting submerged rocks. The incident killed 32 passengers and crew.

While Costa officials contend sales have rebounded since the incident, helped in part by attractive cruise pricing, industry challenges remain, such as the shaky European economy.

"The South Florida market for the Caribbean [sailings] remains strong," said Ruben Perez, Costa's general manager, North America. "Our ships are going full, which is a good thing,"

Fares for Luminosa's Dec. 27 cruise start at $699 per person double occupancy for an inside cabin, according to Costa's website, costacruise.com.

That pricing offers extra value as it's about the same as a 7-day Caribbean cruise on competitor ships, Knutson noted. "We are excited to be able to expose more North American guests to our international product and let them see firsthand what makes Costa the No. 1 cruise line in Europe."

Starting in January, Costa plans to restrict smoking to cigar bars on its ships and a handful of other designated areas, bringing it in line with cruise lines already offering smoke-free environments in public spaces and cabins, Knutson said.

By Arlene Satchell, Sun Sentinel

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The shipwrecked Costa Concordia cruise liner could be re-floated by June 2014, the engineer overseeing the long-delayed salvage operation off the Italian island of Giglio said on Saturday.

He said giant tanks that will help float the ship will be fixed to its side by April, mirroring the ones already welded to the other side before the 290-metre (951-foot) ship was dragged upright in September.

"This would allow us to re-float the ship by June," Franco Porcellacchia told local residents on Giglio, Italian media reported, although he emphasised that it would be "a delicate and weather-sensitive operation".

"I am extremely confident," Porcellacchia said.

He said the ship could then be towed to a nearby port, or part of the way there and then carried by the semi-submersible Vanguard heavy lift ship, which is usually used to transport offshore rigs.

There is still no agreement over what port the Costa Concordia could be taken to for the lucrative scrapping operation, and the most frequently mentioned option, nearby Piombino, cannot take in such a large ship.

The Costa Concordia crashed into Giglio on the night of January 13, 2012 as it was attempting a risky salute manoeuvre close to some rocks just off the shore.

The ship keeled over with 4,229 people from 70 countries on board, and hundreds were forced to jump into the sea during a panicky evacuation.

Thirty-two people lost their lives in the disaster.

The salvage operation for the Costa Concordia, which belongs to cruise ship operator Costa Crociere, is the biggest ever attempted for a passenger ship.

By AFP

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The man, who has not been named by police, allegedly climbed on board the vessel late on Thursday night with an Irishman and two South Africans, all employees of salvage firm Salvage Consortium Titan-Micoperi which is working to remove the ship from rocks on the Italian island of Giglio, where it capsized last year.

Caught by CCTV set up on an off limits area of the ship, the men were arrested by officers of the Italian Carabinieri police and found in possession of an empty rucksack bearing the cruise ship’s company logo, an investigative source said.

“The men, who were relatively new arrivals on the island, have been released pending a possible trial,” said the source. Charges could include theft and illegally entering a crime scene which is still officially sealed off.

In a statement, Titan said “The company has taken immediate action to remove (the) workers from the project.”

The 114,000 tonne Costa Concordia was righted to a semi-submerged, but upright position in September as part of a 600 million euro salvage operation after it smashed into rocks in January 2012 and capsized, leading to the loss of 32 lives. Salvage workers now hope to float it off next Spring.

Thieves stole the ship’s brass bell three months after the incident, although security on board has been tight since the ship was righted. Search teams combing the cabins and corridors have located the body of the Maria Grazia Trecarichi, one of two passengers whose bodies were not found, but are yet to find the body of Indian waiter Russel Rebello.

“Searching will only now resume when the ship is in a dock, drained of water,” said the police source.

The Italian court which is now trying the ship’s captain, Francesco Schettino, for manslaughter, has meanwhile allowed salvage workers to start removing passengers’ cabin safes from the ship, following a request from consumers’ group Codacons, which said “the contents can now finally be restored to their legitimate owners.”

The removal of the safes, albeit only those which have remained above water, will help salvage workers lighten the vessel as much as possible to ensure it floats as high in the water as possible when it is raised from the underwater platform on which it currently sits.

The safes will be taken to a court-appointed warehouse at Talamone on the Italian mainland where the contents will be matched with owners, said a spokewoman for the ship’s operator, Costa Crociere.

Titan is meanwhile working to protect the ship from being shattered by winter storms by fixing steel braces between it and the underwater platform and padding its landward side with sacks of cement to stop it moving, she added.

By Tom Kington, The Telegraph

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Costa Crociere, the Italian unit in Carnival Corp & plc group, says it will invest $18 million to refurbish the 1996 built Costa Victoria.

The 75,166 gross ton ship will re-enter service on 11 November when it departs from Singapore for her first cruise after the upgrade.

“Our investment in Costa Victoria will offer our valued passengers the absolute finest and most enjoyable cruising holiday,” said Mr. Buhdy Bok, Senior Vice President Pacific Asia & China of Costa Crociere S.p.A. “Costa Cruises is proud of how we’ve developed and have been able to satisfy the rapidly growing demand for cruise holidays with innovative and high-quality cruising options.”

Carnival group has an agreement with the Sembawang Shipyard in Singapore that makes the Sembcorp Marine unit strategic partner in refits for the world’s largest cruise shipping group in the Far East.

By Kari Reinikainen, Cruise Business Review

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Divers on Thursday recovered what they believe could be the remains of the last two missing bodies from the sea where the Costa Concordia cruise liner sank last year off the Italian island of Giglio.

The huge ship was carrying more than 4,000 holidaymakers and crew when it capsized after striking rocks on January 13, 2012, killing 32 people, including two whose bodies were not recovered.

The head of the civil protection agency, Franco Gabrielli, told reporters the remains discovered on Thursday were "absolutely consistent" with the two missing people - an Indian man and an Italian woman.

However, their identities could be confirmed only after DNA testing, he said.

After lying on its side in shallow water ever since capsizing, the Costa Concordia was hauled upright last week in a complicated 19-hour salvage operation.

Recovering the human remains after 20 months under the weight of the 114,500 metric ton vessel was "almost a miracle," Gabrielli said. A spokeswmoman for the civil protection agency all that was left of the bodies were bone fragments.

The ship is due to be towed away from the Mediterranean holiday island, probably by next spring, and eventually broken up into scrap.

By Gavin Jones; Editing by Angus MacSwan (Reuters)

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The 114,000-tonne Costa Concordia cruise liner, which had been lying on its side off the coast of Giglio since January 2012, has been uprighted in an unprecedented salvage maneuver that engineers hope they will never have to repeat. Rotating the 290-meter-long ship up to vertical, performed by salvage firm JVC Titan-Micoperi, took 19 hours—almost twice as long at the experts who designed the plan predicted. The ship had to be painstakingly raised 65 degrees to reach center, and it took eight hours to complete the first 10 degrees, nudging the ship off the rocks on which it was impaled. As seen on time-lapse video, the second half of the “parbuckling” operation took far less time than the first half.

After the successful operation, Titan director Capt. Richard Habib told Scientific American that parbuckling was the last choice for a salvage this size. When asked if he thought the operation would set the standard in maritime operation—just moments after the giant vessel successfully came to rest on its platform bed—Habib said, “I hope not. It’s much easier to blow them up.”

No doubt, Habib meant that the risk of failure is far too high to make parbuckling a standard in salvage. According to Nick Sloane, the salvage master for the project, the many engineers had planned for every possible worst-case scenario—from the ship breaking apart under its own weight to the platforms built on the seafloor to hold it crushing or slipping away. But there was one situation for which no plan could be made: the weather. Sloane said weather “is what I was most worried about.”

In fact, the evening before the parbuckling, a torrential rainstorm with high winds caused rough seas, which delayed the positioning of the control tower, setting back the start time of the operation on Monday morning by three hours. And because strong seas were forecast for the day after the operation was to be finished, Sloane said they rushed the final pulling maneuvers to make the ship upright, working through the dark Monday night. It was better to risk going too fast than be caught in a storm when the ship was balancing at a precarious angle. “Keeping the ship in such a vulnerable position for so long was worrying,” he said after the parbuckling was complete. “We knew the weather was changing, so we had to make it work before sunrise.”

The seas on Tuesday were extremely rough, causing some concern that toxic substances inside the ship could be knocked out into the water and carried quickly in the wind. Constant tests of both the water and air quality proved that no contamination from the vessel, which holds an estimated 20,000 tons of filthy water laced with cleaning chemicals, paint thinners and rotting food, had escaped.

Now that the Concordia is upright, the next phase of the operation can begin. In the coming weeks engineers will make a detailed scan of the badly damaged side of the ship that had been caught on the rocks. The sponsons, or flotation boxes, that will eventually be attached to the so-called broken side of the ship will have to be fairly flexible and move with the sea, Sloane said, in stark contrast to the boxes on the undamaged side, which are rigid and fixed. Each one will be tailor-made to fit one part of the undulating broken side, shipped to the site and fitted, which will not be complete until next spring.

Only then can the engineers refloat the ship, which is now sunken in 30 meters of water. The giant vessel will rise up 22 meters from its current position, in a procedure that should be at least as spectacular as the parbuckling was. Securing the ship’s underbelly will then take three more weeks, meaning it will finally be towed away sometime next summer.

By Barbie Latza Nadeau, Scientific American

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Italian authorities will begin the search for the bodies of two people who remain unaccounted for after the Costa Concordia cruise liner was shipwrecked in January 2012, officials said Tuesday.

An Italian and an Indian are believed to be among the 32 dead, but their corpses have never been found.

Officials told NBC News that diving teams and cameras will be used in a bid to locate them, following the massive salvage operation that saw the 114,500-ton ship pulled upright by a series of huge jacks and cables and set on artificial platforms drilled into the rocky sea bed.

Engineers celebrated well into the night after the so-called parbuckling operation, in which the ship was painstakingly rotated upright during the 19-hour operation -- more than seven hours longer than the time it was estimated to take.

Salvage master Nick Sloane was brought to tears talking about his relief that the operation worked.

But after the party was over it was back to work -- to begin repairing the significant damage to the ship, which continues to sit off the Italian island of Giglio more than 20 months after it crashed into rocks there.

Exterior balconies were mangled and entire sections looked warped, though officials said the damage probably looks worse than it really is.

With high winds and rough seas expected to whip the 300-foot liner this winter, crews will attempt to stabilize the vessel quickly before floating it away from the coastline so that it can be scrapped next year.

However Sloane seemed confident the ship would survive.

"She was strong enough to come up like this, she's strong enough to be towed," he told The Associated Press.

By Henry Austin, NBC News contributor

NBC News' Michelle Kosinski and The Associated Press contributed to this report

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The capsized cruise liner Costa Concordia was sitting upright early Tuesday after the first step of an unprecedented effort to salvage the ill-fated ship.

In a lengthy process involving massive pulleys, cables and steel tanks, a salvage crew managed to roll the 114,00-ton vessel off of the rocks where it ran aground in January 2012 as it passed the Italian island of Giglio. Once righted, the Concordia sported a sharp, slashing line separating the white paint of the exposed hull from the brownish muck that had collected on its submerged starboard side.

"It was a perfect operation, I would say," said Franco Porcellacchia, the head of the technical team for the cruise line Costa Crochiere, owned by American firm Carnival Cruises.

The effort began at 9 a.m. Monday (3 a.m. ET). By midnight, despite delays for thunderstorms and for slack in a crucial cable, the ship had been hauled off the rocks and upward about 25 degrees -- far enough to start drawing water into the massive steel boxes attached to the side of the hull, using the weight of that water to finish rolling the hulk onto a steel platform built off the sea floor.

It took only four more hours for the wrecked ship to come to rest on the platform.

The Costa Concordia disaster killed 32 of the 4,200 people on board. The remains of two victims, Russel Rebello of India and Maria Grazia Trecarichi of Sicily, never have been recovered.

Once the hull was peeled off the rocks, operators sent robotic cameras to survey the damage but found no sign of bodies. But there also appeared to be no sign of leaks, Franco Gabrielli, the head of Italy's Civil Protection agency, told reporters -- a promising sign, as the wrecked liner is full of spoiled food and chemicals including paint and lubricants.

Rebello, 33, was a cruise waiter who was last seen helping passengers off the ship. Trecarichi was on the cruise to celebrate her 50th birthday with her 17-year-old daughter, who was one of thousands of people who survived the deadly shipwreck.

A complex operation

The nearly $800 million effort is the largest maritime salvage operation ever, according to Reporters and sightseers lined the port and the hillsides to watch as the work began.

It sounds counterintuitive, but in order to salvage the Costa Concordia, crews worked to sink portions of it deeper underwater.

The process that began Monday is known as parbuckling, in which cables began to haul the 952-foot ship upright. It's become a household term in Giglio, the tiny island that was transformed when the Costa Concordia ran aground.

The ship is being rotated onto giant platforms 30 meters (about 98 feet) below the water level. Areas of the ship that have been dry for months will be submerged and filled with water.

A ship this large and this heavy has never been parbuckled before. Normally, crews would blow up the ship or take it apart on site -- a cheaper route than what's being done now.

But officials say that's not an option with the Costa Concordia, because the ship is filled with noxious substances, and because there are two bodies still believed to be either trapped between the ship and its rocky resting place or somewhere deep in the ship's hollow hull.

Technicians and salvage managers from all over the world will be watching closely to see what goes wrong and what works.

"It will set the new standard for maritime salvage," Giovanni Ceccarelli, the project's engineering manager, told CNN.

Hundreds of people and dozens of companies have collaborated on the preparations, but the parbuckling will come down to 12 people, including the salvage master and specialized technicians, who will be guiding the operation from inside a prefabricated control room set up on a tower on a barge in front of the ship.

In preparation for Monday, tall towers had been anchored onto the rocky shoreline between the ship and the island have been fitted with computer-operated pulley-like wheels.

When the rotation began, the wheels guided thick cables and chains pulling the middle third of the ship from under its belly toward Giglio. At the same time, more chains and cables attached to the sponsons welded onto the ship's port side pulled the ship from the top toward the open sea.

After passing the 20-degree mark, gravity takes over and the ship essentially finishes the process, relying on the sponsons alone to control the speed at which it rights itself. Technicians will need to pump compressed air into the boxes to control the water levels, which will create buoyancy to slow the ship's rotation until it eventually comes to rest on makeshift "mattresses" put in place on the steel platforms.

If all goes well, the ship won't separate or break apart. If things go wrong, it could be disastrous.

Noxious substances, other items on board

The ship contains a mix of chemicals that would be devastating for the environment if leaked into the water, which would happen if the ship breaks apart or sinks.

According to the Costa Concordia's inventory list published in the Italian press and confirmed by Costa, thousands of liters of thick lubricants, paints, insecticides, glue and paint thinners were on board before it set sail three hours before it crashed.

There are also 10 large tanks of oxygen and 3,929 liters of carbon dioxide.

That's not all.

Refrigerators filled with milk, cheese, eggs and vegetables have been closed tight since the disaster.

And the freezers that have not burst under the water pressure are still locked with their thawed, rotting contents sealed inside, including 1,268 kilograms of chicken breasts, 8,200 kilograms of beef, 2,460 kilograms of cheese and 6,850 liters of ice cream.

But as the ship rotates, much more water will enter it than will spill out, salvage operators say. That fresh seawater will dilute some of the toxic mix, but it will all eventually have to be purified and pumped out before the ship is towed across the sea for dismantling at its final port -- a location that remains to be determined.

In the meantime, the salvage operators have set up two rings of oil booms with absorbent sponges and skirts that extend into the water to catch any debris that may escape.

Once the ship is upright, it will be months before the contents are removed, probably not until it reaches its final port.

At that time, Costa officials say they intend to remove personal effects from the staterooms and return those to each passenger, no matter how soggy. None of that is expected to happen before next summer.

Meanwhile, Francesco Schettino, the captain who guided the ship off course, faces charges of manslaughter, causing a maritime disaster and abandoning ship with passengers still on board. His trial resumes in Grosseto on September 23.

A turning point

Once the ship is upright, the salvage operation changes dramatically.

A tiny robotic submarine with surveillance cameras will survey the damaged side of the ship and create models needed in planning for the next phase of operations.

"It will look like a high-impact car accident when it is lifted," Nick Sloane, the salvage master, told CNN. "It won't be pretty."

For days, salvage workers have been running simulations and testing their equipment. A steady hum of machinery out on the wreckage site could be heard night and day in Giglio harbor.

The ship looks nothing like it did months ago, when it seemed gigantic against the tiny island.

Now giant cranes, barges and generator towers dwarf the wreckage.

Success or failure, no matter what happens Monday, the Concordia will never again look the same.

By From Barbie Latza Nadeau. for CNN. and Matt Smith, CNN

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The nautical blue paint spelling out "Costa Concordia" has almost all bubbled and chipped off the bow of the once luxurious cruise liner after 20 months under salt water off the Italian island of Giglio.

One can get glimpse of just what it's like in and under the Concordia by the vast array of mesmerizing underwater videos released by Italy's coast guard and the Titan Micoperi salvage team tasked with removing the rusting hulk.

The seabed is still littered with sun deck chairs that floated from the ship's balconies and upper deck when it finally came to a rest in January 2012. Fish swim around the sunbed legs and seaweed has grown through some of the mesh seating. The beds are spread out in a surreal scene that looks like a set from an underwater science fiction film. Shoes, mattresses, dinner plates and thousands of pieces of cutlery shimmer in the divers' lights on a bed of sea grass.

Divers have not been deep inside the massive ship for nearly a year. The salvage divers only work on the outside of the ship and do not have authority to enter the vessel, with the exception of a work area they have created with a false floor on the upper port side deck, unless accompanied by Coast Guard divers.

Not only is the Concordia still chock full of passengers' possessions the Costa Cruises company hopes to return, but the ship is still considered a crime scene. Thirty-two people died in the accident and the ship's erstwhile captain, Francesco Schettino, is facing charges of multiple manslaughter and causing the shipwreck after piloting the 290-meter ship into the rocks on Giglio last year.

The last divers to comb through the Concordia's sunken bowels were there to search in vain for the last two victims, still believed to be trapped somewhere under the ship or buried in a watery grave at the bottom of the hollow hull. The salvage crew believe they know about where the bodies might be found, but there is no guarantee until the ship is lifted whether they will be found at all.

In the weeks after the accident, the divers called the inside of the ship a "toxic stew" of spilled oil, rotting food and floating tableware. There were five massive restaurants on the ship -- each one in operation when the ship crashed at 9:42 p.m. on January 13, 2013, spilling tables of buffet food into the water. More than a dozen kitchens and freezers had enough food to feed the 4,200 passengers and crew for a week, plus extra supplies that all cruise ships carry in case of emergencies and delays. Many of the freezers burst and their contents were gobbled up by sea life and the colony of sea gulls that has multiplied on the island since the disaster.

Fishermen off Giglio say that the fish have changed, too. They are much larger and harder to catch after gorging on the ship's offerings. The freezers that have not burst under the water pressure are still locked with their rotting thawed contents sealed inside. Fridges too, filled with milk, cheese, eggs and vegetables, have been closed tight since the disaster. One has to only imagine leaving a home freezer -- a fraction of the size of the industrial freezers used by cruise ships -- unplugged for 20 months to get an idea of the type of rancid mess trapped inside.

Rodolfo Raiteri, head of the Coast Guard dive team, told CNN that his divers had to confront an array of deep-sea threats, from floating knives to lethal bed sheets and flowing curtains that could have easily become entangled in the divers' safety cords. There were also floating chairs and large chunks of marble and crystal chandeliers that constantly detached and fell from the sideways ship's ceilings every time the ship creaked and shifted as it settled onto two underwater rocky mountain peaks. All that debris, along with thousands of dinner plates, can be seen stacked against the underwater windows in some of the salvage video.

The ship has compressed three full meters in the 20 months since it crashed, and each time it groans and twists, windows break as their frames adjust and once-attached items are lodged free. On cruise ships, dining room tables are all affixed to the floors to keep passengers from chasing sliding tables in rough seas. Raiteri described the bizarre scene his divers faced swimming among the sideways tables, sometimes encountering plates of food and floating champagne bottles in their search for victims.

Senior cabin service director Manrico Giampedroni, one of the last survivors to be pulled out of the wreckage alive, became trapped half submerged in the ship's dining room when his leg got caught among fallen furniture. He survived for 36 hours on floating food and stayed awake by drinking caffeinated beverages until rescuers found him. If he had fallen asleep, he would have drowned. Incidentally, Giampedroni was later convicted of involuntary manslaughter in a plea bargain for his role in the deaths for not being at his duty station to help evacuate the ship.

In addition to the general rule of thumb that you don't blow up ships where there are still unrecovered victims, one of the main reasons the Concordia is being refloated rather than blown up or dismantled on site is because of the toxins and personal effects still trapped in the ship's 1,500 staterooms. The ship's engines are still thick with lubricants and the kitchens are still filled with cooking oils and non-soluble materials that would pollute the sea.

Giglio, which lies within the Pelagos Sanctuary, the largest protected marine wildlife park in the Mediterranean, is flush with exotic sea life and coral reefs. The putrid stew inside the ship's 17 deck-structure will eventually have to be purified or pumped out before the ship is refloated sometime next year, and the personal effects are another matter.

All that was in the Concordia the moment it wrecked is presumably still there, save the ship's bell, which mysteriously disappeared two months after the wreck based on surveillance video taken by authorized divers. An investigation into who could have stolen the bell has caused some concern that other items, especially high price items from the ship's gift shops, could have also been pilfered. Everything inside the ship is expected to be recovered and returned to its original owners, no matter how water-logged it may be, but that could be months from now when the ship is eventually towed and dry docked for dismantling.

Each of the cabins has a locked safe, presumably still filled with passengers' valuables including cash and jewelry. There are also countless cameras, laptops, iPads and cellphones that passengers left behind, not to mention luggage. The ship had only been at sail for three hours, so many passengers likely didn't take time to unpack, but instead headed to the nearest dining room or bar to relax as the ship set sail. One suitcase floated to the nearby island of Elba and its soggy contents were delivered to the owner nine months after the disaster. Many more suitcases have been spotted by divers at the bottom of the sea.

Nick Sloane, the head of the salvage operation for Titan Micoperi, the joint American-Italian venture to rescue the Concordia,, says that if explosives were used, the ship's smaller contents would become dangerous projectiles. "Mattresses and passports would scatter the sea," he says. But the real danger would be flying cutlery, cooking knives, bottles and broken glass.

If the "parbuckling" goes well and the giant 114,000-ton vessel is tipped upright sometime in the next week, much more than the 65 percent of the ship that is under water now will be submerged. The platforms that will provide a base on which the Concordia will rest are some 30 meters below the sea level, meaning many of the staterooms that were dry until now will sink underwater. Some of the toxic water will be displaced and pushed out of the upper cabins. Some freezers that are still sealed could burst under new water pressure. And almost every window on the ship's outer cabins is expected to break as the ship's frame twists.

Sloane says the noise will be deafening as metal twists and windows pop. The ship has been rigged with cameras and microphones to help the salvage crew monitor the ship's structure as it is lifted. As Sloane says, ships this size were never meant to lie on their sides, and they are not built to be lifted. The salvage team says they will be able to contain any spillage of toxins with oil booms now in place around the work site. The broken glass and new debris will join what is already at the bottom of the sea.

There will never be the scale of environmental disaster that was already averted by removing the ship's 2,400 tons of fuel shortly after the ship crashed, but there are still major risks involved with salvaging the Concordia. If the parbuckling fails and the ship breaks apart as it is rotated, the rotten contents -- moldy mattresses, passports, toxic stew and all -- will spill into the once-pristine sea. And even if it succeeds, this part of the Mediterranean will never be quite the same again.

By Barbie Latza Nadeau, For CNN

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Engineers have a daring scheme to move the Costa Concordia which is lying just outside the harbor of the Tuscan island of Giglio.

ROME — An international team of engineers and other experts has devised no “Plan B” if an attempt to right the hulking wreck of the grounded Costa Concordia goes wrong and the cruise liner splits apart or falls back on its side near an Italian island.

The team is attempting an unprecedented engineering bet to remove the luxury liner from just outside the harbor of Giglio island where it has been lying on its side after smashing into a jagged reef. Assuming seas are calm, the ship will be slowly pulled to the vertical in an hours-long operation so it can be towed to a mainland port and turned into scrap.

The possibility that the Mediterranean cruise liner might fall apart is a “remote event,” insisted Franco Gabrielli, head of Italy’s Civil Protection agency, at a briefing Thursday to lay out logistics. “If the ship doesn’t turn” back upright, “there is no other way” to try it again.

Thirty-two people died when the Concordia crashed on the evening of Jan. 13, 2012, as the captain steered the vessel close to the island of Giglio’s rocky coastline. The reef sliced a 230-foot-long gash into a side of the hull, seawater rushed in and the Concordia began to lean over on one side, listing so quickly that many lifeboats couldn’t be lowered to help save the 4,200 passengers and cruise aboard the pleasure cruise.

A 500-member salvage team from 24 nations will be conducting the operation to move the ship, known in nautical terms as parbuckling, before autumn storm season arrives, when winds and powerful waves risk battering it to the point it won’t hold together.

Dozens of crank-like pulleys will start slowly rotating the ship upright at a rate of about 3 yards per hour. Steel chains weighing 17,000 tons have been looped under the vessel to help pull it upright. Tanks filled with water on the exposed side will also help rotate it upward.

Although parbuckling is a tested way to set upright capsized vessels, the operation has never been applied to a huge cruise liner.

Engineer Nick Sloane, a South African who is senior salvage master, said the Concordia will suffer an “extreme amount of force” of compression in the first part of the maneuver. But “we’re pretty satisfied” the vessel will survive the stress, Sloane said. “We expect her to come up” to vertical, he said. “We’re quite confident.”

“She’s resting in pristine waters on this hill” of two massive pieces of sloping granite seabed, Sloane said. He likened the ship’s hull bottom to a “big belly ... about the size of a football field” perched on the two reefs.

Months ago, divers inserted cement-filled bags and grouting between the reefs to provide more stability. The aim of the parbuckling is to set the wreck upright on an underwater platform that has been installed.

“The objective is to get her to move very slowly and gently,” Sloane said.

Engineers indicated they would be anxiously watching the early parts of the effort. Once the ship moves upward some 25 degrees, “at that point gravity takes over, and at that point, we start feeling relief,” Sloane said.

Many of Giglio’s 1,500 inhabitants work or go to school on the mainland, and authorities will let one last ferry sail from the island at dawn Monday. But no ferries or other boats will be allowed until the effort is completed. If seas are rough, or a storm looms, the ship’s rotation will be postponed to a later day next week.

To cushion the more delicate bow on the Concordia, crews have cradled it in protective material, a measure likened to putting a protective neck brace around an accident victim before being moved.

Bodies of two of the 32 victims, an Italian passenger and a Filipino crew member, were never found. Once the ship is set upright and stabilized, it interior will be searched again in hopes of finding their remains, authorities said.

By Frances D'Emilio, Associated Press

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The wrecked Costa Concordia cruise ship could be upright again next week, nearly two years after the liner capsized and killed at least 30 people off the Italian coast.

The giant vessel, which has lain partly submerged in shallow waters off the Tuscan island of Giglio since the accident in January 2012, will be rolled off the seabed and onto underwater platforms.

Workers will look for the bodies of two people, an Italian and an Indian unaccounted for since the disaster, as machines haul the 114,000-tonne ship upright and underwater cameras comb the seabed.

The exact day of the Concordia's rotation - known as parbuckling - has yet to be set, but on Wednesday Civil Protection Commissioner Franco Gabrielli said Monday was likely.

The Costa Concordia hit a rock when it manoeuvred too close to the island, prompting a chaotic evacuation of more than 4,000 passengers and crew, in one of the most dramatic marine accidents in recent history.

Divers have pumped 18,000 tonnes of cement into bags below the ship to support it and prevent it from breaking up in an operation which is expected to last 8-10 hours.

A buoyancy device acting "like a neck brace for an injured patient" will hold together the ship's bow, and fishing nets will catch debris as it rises from beneath the ship, said Nicholas Sloane, senior salvage master at Titan Salvage.

The salvage team will go through the ship cabin by cabin and had over items found on board to the Italian state prosecutor, and the vessel will be towed away to be dismantled.

Four Costa Concordia crew members and a Costa Cruises company official were sentenced to jail in July for their part in the accident, and the ship's captain Francesco Schettino remains on trial for manslaughter and causing the loss of the ship.

The captain is accused of abandoning ship before all crew and passengers had been rescued. A coastguard's angry phone order to him - "Get back on board, damn it!" - became a catchphrase in Italy after the accident.

By Reuters

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Today at Fincantieri's Marghera, Italy, shipyard, Costa Diadema's fore-end block hull section was laid. The future flagship of Costa Cruises' Italian-flagged fleet is scheduled for delivery Oct. 30, 2014. With Costa Diadema's entry into service, the Costa fleet -- Europe's largest -- will accommodate up to 45,000 guests.

The fore-end block section is approximately 26 feet high, 111 feet long, 118 feet wide at its maximum beam and weighs 432 tons.

Costa Cruises is investing approximately $721 million to build Costa Diadema. It is the 10th cruise ship built in Italy by Fincantieri for Costa Cruises since 2000, representing a total investment of almost $6.5 billion.

Among the many innovations onboard Costa Diadema are new wine-tasting venues including the Vinoteca and Proseccheria, the Bavarian Bierkeller for a wide selection of beers, and new dining choices such as Japanese Teppanyaki, Piazza Pizza and Gelateria for desserts.

The new flagship's interiors will offer split-level public rooms overlooking the sea that are interconnected. For sun, sea and ocean vistas, there is a 1,640-square-foot open-air promenade with cabanas.

New entertainment offerings include the Country Rock Club with American music and arcade-style interactive games including Laser Maze.

Portobello Market Piazza will be the heart of an 11,840-square-foot area consisting of designer stores and retail outlets. The three-level Samsara Spa -- located on the upper decks -- has an exclusive outdoor area and privileged access. The full-service facility offers guests an opportunity to enjoy the holistic regenerating experience.

By Travel Agent Central

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