The Curtsey
On board the Costa Concordia.
MAY 9, 2023
The shipwreck was set in motion in the first week of the new year. One evening in the first week of January 2012, Antonello Tievoli, the maitre d’ for the Costa Concordia cruise ship, approached Captain Francesco Schettino with an unusual request. Every Friday, the ship passed through a 10-mile-wide strip of sea that runs between the Tuscan promontory of Monte Argentario and the island of Giglio. Tievoli hoped that just this once, Schettino could change the route so that it could get a little closer to the island. He wanted to pay tribute to his elderly mother, who lived in a little house just south of the port, above a small cliff. Tievoli was certain she would be pleased by the gesture. And the request wasn’t all that unusual: in Italian nautical jargon, such a maneuver is known as an inchino, or curtsey. Schettino, always accommodating, appeared willing to do it that week. But on Friday, January 6, inclement weather led him to keep his distance from the island. Tievoli waited patiently, and the following week, he tried again.
On the evening of Thursday, January 12, 2012, as the Concordia slid across the water from Palermo to Civitavecchia, Schettino was preparing for a dinner like many others. The occasion was a gala dinner for cruise guests, prior to which Captain Schettino and his top brass-- the second in command, the doctor, the hotel director, his director’s assistant, and a few other naval officers—would host the guests for a cocktail party. When the time came for dinner, Tievoli greeted them standing erect and composed, receiving cruise guests with a cordial smile. Out of the corner of his eye, he was monitoring the hallway, because he knew he had to intercept the captain at all costs. It was his last chance. He would be disembarking two days later, in Savona. When Schettino arrived with a group of officers, Tievoli cornered him. Did he remember his promise? Giglio island. Yes, the captain said he remembered. His answer was the same as the previous week. Schettino kept it vague, but implied that he had no reason not to oblige. A witness to the scene later reported that one of the officers had leaned in toward Tievoli to reassure him: “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of the ‘curtsey.’” The room around them was full of happy, oblivious people. The worst night of their lives had just begun. The fuse had been lit and the countdown had begun.
[Read: The Law of the Sea Needs a Rewrite]
The next day was Friday the 13th, a most hated number among sailors everywhere. The manufacturers of the Costa Concordia had done everything possible to avoid references to “13” on board. The ship had no deck number 13: the count skipped directly from 12 to 14. There was no lifeboat number 13. But there was nothing they could have done to avoid the date. On January 13, the sun rose at 7:41am and promised to set early, at 5:02pm. It was supposed to be cold, but not as cold as one would expect in January, with temperatures between 45 and 50 degrees. The forecast predicted rough seas.
The Costa Concordia was scheduled to remain at the Civitavecchia port until 7 p.m. and then set sail for Savona, where it would end its tour of the Mediterranean. The morning was dedicated to welcoming new passengers. That day, an unusual group boarded: Ten beauty professionals from all over Italy had been waiting weeks to take part in their big break, a reality TV show called Professione Lookmaker, which is set onboard the Concordia. They had each spent €2,500 to participate. The winner would take home €100,000 to invest in their business.
One of the beauty professionals, Safaa Sikri, arrived on the Concordia looking like a diva, sporting a sleek hairdo, a proud stance, and Louis Vuitton luggage. Before she embarked, she said goodbye to Donato, her boyfriend of less than 24 hours. She’d been selected for the contest in October and had been eagerly anticipating it ever since.
That evening, Safaa got dolled up for dinner at Milano, the on-board restaurant. There, she would meet up with other contestants, all of whom were also wearing their finest outfits. She carefully chose a light black dress—serious, but not too serious, she figured— a pair of ballerina slippers for style and comfort, and a white purse she’d bought especially for the trip. She wanted to make a good impression. It took her forever to decide what to wear, so she was late for dinner. When she got to Milano, she crossed the room, breathless, and someone from production directed her to an empty seat. The show’s 200 participants sat around large round tables, the smells of their perfume and food mingling together.
Safaa had just managed to sit down and order a glass of water when she was thrown from her chair, plates and jugs falling on top of her. The sound of scraping metal had interrupted the proceedings. The feeling reminded Safaa of the way a ferry rocks as it docks at port: chains get thrown overboard and the boat starts to produce a metallic din. She thought back to all the times she’d disembarked from the ferry at home, in Morocco. But home had never felt so far away as it did in that moment.
Then the lights went out. Darkness engulfed the restaurant and a chorus of screams filled the room. Passengers quickly headed for Milano’s exits. Some were crying while others prayed out loud. Stunned waiters tried to restore order, to no avail. Safaa tried to stay calm, but she was scared like everyone else. No one is used to seeing everything around them suddenly lurch out of nowhere, as if under the control of an army of ghosts. The sudden loss of balance had shaken her so badly she could hardly stand up. She, too, was soon searching for the exits.
The lights flickered on and off several times. That was what really made her lose it. Each time the lights came back on, Sikri had to regain her bearings all over again in a ship she’d only been on for a few hours, only to have them turn off once again. She had to be realistic, she kept telling herself. She had to keep her fear at bay and remain in control. Everything was going to be fine. A few people had fainted outside the restaurant, so Safaa went back in to look for water. Someone asked her for help. No one knew what to do or where to go, and the crew were at a loss to answer the barrage of questions the guests were asking. Some passengers started to don orange life vests, grabbing them from lockers scattered along the decks.
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Moments before they sat down for dinner, the ship had begun narrowly passing Giglio island, traveling through a c-shaped inlet that is closed off on each side by two rocky points near the port. Just above them was Punta Smeraldo, where the maitre d’s mother lived. Below them, underwater, lay two large rocky formations whose points jutted out of the sea. They were followed by a third rock, smaller and half hidden by the waves, that marked the top of a short rise—a shoal—that continued for a few feet below sea level.
An evacuation protocol was supposed to have been immediately put into effect to try to ensure that all passengers could disembark safely. But that day, there were no orders being issued from the command bridge. No evacuation plan was announced.
In that exact moment, the ship’s hotel director, Manrico Giampedroni, was leaning over the port side with a colleague who was saying, “We’re right over the rocks here, we’re getting too close to the island.” Giampedroni had reassured him, saying, “Nah, our captain is good...” but he didn’t have time to finish the sentence before the ship was shaken by a long and terrible tremor. The ancient granite rocks opened its left flank like a can of tuna, causing a laceration almost 100 feet wide.
That day, a Gregale wind coming from the northeast was sweeping through the southern Tyrrhenian Sea, blowing from the continent toward Giglio island. The ship ran aground on Le Scole, a rock formation off the coast of Giglio, and Captain Schettino managed to salvage the vessel from the shoal. The wounded Concordia continued due north, passing the port of Giglio on its left and heading toward the Gabbianara cliffs. But the wheel had gotten stuck during Schettino’s maneuver, and the malfunction diverted the trajectory of the ship toward the open sea, in a northeasterly direction. The Gregale, along with invisible underwater currents, had pushed against the ship’s left flank, leading the whole of the colossus to enter a leeway drift, eventually turning it back around toward the island.
The Concordia was at the mercy of the elements, following a trajectory that was beyond its control. An evacuation protocol was supposed to have been immediately put into effect to try to ensure that all passengers could disembark safely. But that day, there were no orders being issued from the command bridge. No evacuation plan was announced.
The captain was on the phone. Forty-five minutes had passed since the impact, and the captain had been on the line with the Concordia’s crisis center ever since. But he had not yet made a decision about what should be done. The ship was slowly listing and the information coming from the control room was growing progressively worse.
He wondered if it spelled his own end. Was this how he and his colleagues would die, in the steel bowels of a ship, swallowed by the sea, like mice? They’d stayed at their stations out of a pure sense of duty, and the captain seemed to have forgotten about them.
In the control room, on Deck 0, chief engineer Giuseppe Pilon, chief mate Giovanni Iaccarino and all the other sailors who’d rushed to monitor the situation after the impact were exasperated. They’d been down there for more than half an hour and they’d lost their sense of time. The deck was filling up with water, and they were starting to feel claustrophobic. “Why aren’t they sounding the alarm?” Pilon wondered aloud, frustrated. The Concordia was practically dead, flatlining. The sailors had no purpose anymore, there was nothing to be done. They couldn’t see anything from down there—none of them had any idea where the ship was at that moment. Last they’d heard, they were sailing away from the island, so they figured they were already on the open sea. As the ship’s tilt grew more pronounced, water started to flow from other decks onto the one where they were walking. Iaccarino was sure that the Concordia was about to capsize and sink. He wondered if it spelled his own end. Was this how he and his colleagues would die, in the steel bowels of a ship, swallowed by the sea, like mice? They’d stayed at their stations out of a pure sense of duty, and the captain seemed to have forgotten about them.
A few decks higher, passengers continued to despair. A woman with two newborns called the carabinieri, the national gendarmerie, in alarm. A man named Massimiliano Moroni called another carabinieri station three times. A recording of his calls paints a picture of a panicked father growing increasingly worried about the lives of his children, and begging for mercy:
“Listen, I’m a passenger on the Costa Concordia. I think we’re here off the coast of Orbetello. The ship is listing to one side, but nobody here is telling us anything.”
“Sir, we’re aware. We’re in touch with the port authority. But what are the conditions on board? The ship is listing?”
“The ship is listing to one side. They’re telling us there was a blackout, but they didn’t say anything after that. We don’t know anything. There’s panic on board.”
“Sir, maybe try to control the panic, we’re already in direct contact with the port authority. We’re being told of a blackout, not of other problems on board...The Coast Guard has sent a skiff to the area. You’re near Giglio island. Can you see the coast from there?”
“Yes, but the ship is listing more and more.”
“Are you wearing your life jackets?”
“No, some people don’t have them. We were at dinner...they don’t want to lower the lifeboats...there are so many children on board...can you convince the Concordia to lower the lifeboats? This blasted boat is listing more and more! We can’t stand up, we can’t stand up! They’re not releasing the lifeboats!”
By then, the whole right side of the ship was leaning dangerously into the sea. The lifeboats on deck 4 were visibly slanted, at around 15 degrees. When they reached 20 degrees, many of them would become useless because it would no longer be possible to lower them—especially the boats on the left side, which was slowly turning upwards toward the sky.
The carabinieri, the coast guard, and the police were all demanding action from the captain. The officers surrounding Schettino on the command bridge felt increasingly pressured to tell them what was going on, that it was not a mere “blackout,” as the captain had claimed.
“We have to get out of here,” one of them said at 10:30pm. “Let’s raise the alarm, captain,” another officer said, in a tone halfway between a question and an order. A few seconds later, the first mate called into the command center from the control room: “It’s Iaccarino... the water has reached halfway up the stern lift on deck 0!” A colleague echoed him: “We have to get out of the control room!”
With his men now in serious trouble, Schettino replied that he had to check with the crisis unit again. “Lemme talk to Ferrarini one sec.” This time, the other officers on the bridge stepped up and called for their colleagues below to get out of there. They were crossing the point of no return. Iaccarino and the others ran up the stairs to deck 4 and prepared to carry out their next task: lowering the lifeboats to rescue the passengers.
Panic was everywhere on board. People were fainting. Others had no life vests. Disabled people had no assistance. Mothers and fathers were terrified at the thought of what could happen to their young children.
“Vabbuò, jà, let’s have them disembark,” Schettino finally said, in between calls to various crisis lines. He ordered the deployment of the lifeboats on the right side, the part that was sinking, but not on the left. Those would remain hanging over deck 4 like curing salamis.
The Concordia declared itself to be in a state of distress some fifty minutes after the impact. Over the radio, the officers at last announced that the ship had been breached. Six whistles rang, followed by a long seventh. And then a voice over the loudspeaker: “Ladies and Gentlemen, may I have your attention please...remain calm and head to your muster station, at your meeting point on deck 4. Follow the instructions of the crew. I repeat, head to the muster stations, the meeting point on deck 4, and follow the instructions of the crew while remaining calm.”
His indecision resulted in mayhem on deck 4, where the emergency crew had made several people get into lifeboats, only to ask them to get out again, amidst screams and protests.
But Schettino had not yet uttered the fateful phrase, “abandon ship.” Though he’d just authorized the deployment of the lifeboats, he was playing for time. He wanted to wait for the ship to rest upon the shallow seabed over which it was hovering. “We’re floating. In a minute...I think we’ll float...to slowly ease onto...the rocks and I will need a tow to get me out.” The lifeboats were down, but he had not yet given the orders for people to disembark.
His indecision resulted in mayhem on deck 4, where the emergency crew had made several people get into lifeboats, only to ask them to get out again, amidst screams and protests.
Moroni was among the passengers told to get back on the sinking ship. “Help us, please, the ship is listing,” he asked the carabinieri in his fourth call. “They made us get out of the lifeboats. They’re not telling us anything...I have two kids who are feeling sick. Why did they make us get out of the lifeboats? Help, please help us...”
But the officers were still waiting for the captain to give the order to abandon ship.
More than an hour after the accident, at 10:54 p.m., with the ship’s incline approaching 20 degrees, damning his soul to the winds, Schettino turned to his crew and said, “Hey, are we going to give this ‘abandon ship,’ or what?” He spoke as if it had been someone else who had caused the excessive delay. Simone Canessa, the Costa cartographer, started yelling “Abandon ship!” and his colleagues started echoing him in the background.
“Give the ‘abandon ship,’ come on, do me a favor!” Schettino yelled.
“Abandon ship!” someone else repeated loudly. But the captain immediately corrected him. “No, it’s not really abandoning the ship, say: ‘Let’s bring the passengers ashore! Send them ashore!’”
The bridge had become the stage of a bizarre operetta. The second-in-command, Roberto Bosio, had to ask, “But...umm...so did we give the ‘abandon ship,’ or not?”
“I said to abandon with the lifeboats on the right-hand side...and call from the stern lifeboats, Bosio!” Schettino barked. Apparently, he still wanted to lower only the lifeboats on the right, which were now almost touching the surface of the water. “But, did we do the ‘abandon ship?’” someone else asked. Bosio, meanwhile, was giving the order to put the passengers on the lifeboats and lower them onto the water.
Canessa turned to Schettino and said, “Cap’n, if we’re putting the rafts in the water, can I say on the radio that we’re abandoning ship?”
“We’re evacuating the passengers to shore,” Schettino insisted. “Say that. Aban...evacuating the passengers....”
“Evacuating,” Canessa repeated.
“We’re evacuating the passengers to shore,” Schettino confirmed.
In the end, he also gave the order to deploy the lifeboats on the left. But it was too late. The ship was already tilting too far to save everyone.
Safaa Sikri watched passengers climb off of a lifeboat and back onto the Costa’s deck looking dejected. Others crowded around another lifeboat further down, trying their luck there. She was in a scrum of her own, where the sentiment, she said, “was like ‘I’m going to save my ass before yours,’ so people everywhere were tugging, trying to climb over, jumping, pulling you by the hair, pulling you by the legs….” Her hands were there too, pulling and pushing just like everyone else’s.
“We’re slaughtering each other like sheep, send someone to help!” she heard Moroni say, in his last dramatic call to the carabinieri. He was standing somewhere near Safaa with his wife and kids. “People are flinging themselves into lifeboats…The ship is moving, it’s listing! Help!”
A scream rose from behind him. From the melee, Safaa also heard the scream. It was the desperate cry of a mother, and it jolted her back to her senses. “Children first! Children first!”
It couldn’t end like this, not now, not on that hideous beige carpet covering an increasingly slanting hallway, which now looked more like a slide than a floor. She managed to run across it, balancing with all her might, getting flung against the walls and just barely holding on. Then the ground came out from under her.
Safaa stopped in her tracks. “I had a crisis of conscience,” she told me. “I was like, shit, they’re right, the weaker people first. I stepped back and we all started to load the elderly and the children.”
But then she realized there was no room left for her on any of the lifeboats. The only alternative was to cross the ship, navigating its sharp downward slope, to reach the opposite deck on the right side, and hope to have taken at least one step toward survival. She had to run. She was still young. She had her whole life ahead of her: her dreams, her family, and that guy, Donato, who’d lit up her existence just the night before, and who maybe wasn’t a dick like all the others. It couldn’t end like this, not now, not on that hideous beige carpet covering an increasingly slanting hallway, which now looked more like a slide than a floor. She managed to run across it, balancing with all her might, getting flung against the walls and just barely holding on. Then the ground came out from under her.
The ship jerked once more toward the bottom of the sea, collapsing by a few more degrees. Screams filled the air, as if the Concordia were a big fun house gone wrong. Safaa barely had time to register what was happening before her forehead banged against something hard, making a dull thud. “That’s when I thought it was over.” She looked up, dazed, certain she’d already crossed the line of no return. What she saw seemed like a hallucination. Plates and armchairs were floating in a large pool of water a few steps away from her. She was in the restaurant again. What should she do now? She was injured, trapped in the bowels of another Titanic. The ship was emitting its last spasms of agony. Only a half hour before, in that same flooded room, Safaa had been sitting down, ordering a glass of water with a smile on her face.
Now, she had nothing left to lose. She had to decide whether to try to ford the freezing lake of floating furniture, or turn around and climb back up the hall, which was now even steeper than before. Swim or climb. She didn’t think too long. Climb.
But after clawing her way back up, with all the strength she had in her arms and legs, she found that there were no more lifeboats there either. Nearby, someone was trying to lower a smaller vessel onto the water, a sort of bright red tent with an inflated floor. A raft. Maybe not all was lost.
On the other side of the Concordia, there were only three lifeboats left. One of them was occupied by a family from Apulia: Maria D’Introno and her husband, Vincenzo Roselli, along with his brother and parents. They had boarded the cruise to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary. They were waiting for the boat to deploy, but they’d only managed to lower themselves by one level, to deck 3, before they got stuck. After many attempts to reach sea level, a Russian crew member manning the lifeboat asked the passengers to get back on the ship. His colleague escorted them through a service passage to deck 4, on the right side, which was already sinking. There, the crew was trying to launch inflatable rafts, which turned out to be useless because of the excessive incline.
The right side of deck 3 was now completely under water, and the passengers could clearly hear the portholes imploding under the pressure of the sea, creating fearsome gurgles and undertows.
Maria and Vincenzo ended up waist deep in water, holding hands. They made a split decision to swim the short distance to the rocky black shore in front of them. They were both wearing life vests, but they didn’t know how to swim. A few moments after climbing over the semi-submerged railing, they ran into an obstacle: one of the metallic arms used to lower the lifeboats was sticking out and blocking their escape. They let go of each other’s hands and separated to go around that large metal beam, intending to reunite on the other side. Maria went left, Vincenzo right. Meanwhile, the decks above were dangerously hovering over them, and beds, lounge chairs and all sorts of furniture raining down on them. It was an apocalypse below their feet and above their heads.
Vincenzo heard a sort of explosion coming from below, and later recounted that some large bubbles “bounced” him. He ended up floating on his back, unable to turn around, and only seeing the enormous smokestack of the Costa Concordia looming over him, as if it were about to break off. With difficulty, while calling out to his wife, Vincenzo managed to reach the rocks, where another passenger helped pull him out of the water. His parents, brother and sister-in-law joined him. But there was no sign of Maria. She’d been sucked down by a vortex that the sinking ship had created in the sea. Her body was found nine days later, floating from the ceiling of a cabin on deck 8.
As Vincenzo and his family gathered on Point Gabbianara, screaming Maria’s name into the black night, a man in a life vest was standing still just a few feet away, staring at the disaster, his phone glued to his ear. It was Captain Francesco Schettino. Soon, a criminal investigation into the shipwreck began. On January 17th, five days after the crash, the public prosecutor assigned to the case predicted an extremely harsh sentence for Schettino. In the months following the shipwreck, divers carefully freed passengers’ bodies from straps and fabrics and brought them back to the surface. They found almost all the bodies of the 32 victims. Twelve Germans, six Italians, six French, two Peruvians, two Americans, one Spanish, one Hungarian. Men and woman of all ages. A five-year-old girl.
Months later, standing trial, Schettino declared that Ferrarini had dissuaded him from asking for assistance in order to avoid paying high tugboat fees, saying, “If I’d said over the radio that we had three flooded compartments, the cost of the tugboats that would necessarily follow would have been much higher, and Ferrarini told me, ‘Otherwise they’ll swallow up our ship.’” When the case finally concluded in the spring of 2017, the Supreme Court of Cassation, in Rome, sentenced him to 16 years in prison.
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Right in front of one of the docks on Giglio island stands a little green house. An elderly woman named Nunziatina has been living inside for almost a century. When I went to see her, she immediately pointed to her table, which takes up most of her long and narrow kitchen. Her only window looks out over the sea. “Right here. They were all sitting here,” she said. She remembered the fear on those strangers’ faces. She’d lent them her bathroom and bedroom. She remembered a woman who arrived soaking wet and cold. A little girl in tears for whom she’d prepared a caffe latte. For years, she continued to receive thank-you notes from people whose faces she couldn’t even remember, to whom she’d given her husband’s old pants and shirts after they dragged themselves to shore.
Alvaro Andolfi, who lived in an apartment above the Scole cliffs, had welcomed people with small children into his home. His living room had been packed. The survivors’ main worry, he told me, was that soon they’d have to get back on another ship, a ferry that would take them to the mainland. They weren’t psychologically ready to face the sea again, right after having escaped a shipwreck. One woman was shaking like a leaf as she waited to embark. He’d hugged her, holding her tight for a few minutes, trying to comfort her.
Alvaro is the brother-in-law of the Costa Concordia’s maitre d’, Antonello Tievoli, whose mother lives in a little house right next to Alvaro’s. The famous house of the maitre d’s mother, right over the Scole. I looked at it carefully. It stood above a large, rocky rise, but it didn’t look directly onto the sea. To get to a point where you can see the Scole, you would have to walk down a path for a few dozen feet. The Concordia would have been visible from there. Had the woman gone to that point, that night? I don’t know why, but I had always been curious about whether the curtsey would have actually worked, had the ship not sunk in the attempt. It all started because a son wanted to make his mother happy by passing by on his ship. I wanted to knock on her door and ask her directly, but Alvaro advised me to let it go. His mother-in-law was elderly. And anyway, no, he told me, the signora hadn’t left her house that night to see her son’s ship. It was cold, it was late, it was dark. She’d decided to stay inside, where it was warm. He could have saved himself the trouble.
This piece is an excerpt of Pablo Trincia's Romanzo di un Naufragio: Costa Concordia: una storia vera, (Einaudi 2022). It has been edited and translated from Italian. Published in agreement with MalaTesta Lit. Ag., Milan.
✺ Published in “Issue 4: Shipwrecks” of The Dial
PHOTO: Giuseppe Modesti/AP Photo