10 yrs on, Italy remembers Concordia victims

GIGLIO, Italy — Italy on Thursday marked the 10th anniversary of the Costa Concordia cruise ship disaster with a daylong commemoration ending with a candlelight vigil marking the moment the ship slammed into a reef and then capsized off the Tuscan island of Giglio.

Church bells rang out as a commemorative Mass got underway in the Giglio church to honor the 32 people who died in the Jan. 13, 2012, shipwreck. It was the same church that opened its doors and took in hundreds of survivors on that freezing cold night, giving them shelter after they had arrived on shore in lifeboats, some of them having shimmied down the side of the liner. “I invite you to have the courage to look forward,” Grosseto Bishop Giovanni Roncari told relatives of the dead, survivors and the Coast Guard officials who helped coordinate the rescue that night. “Hope doesn’t cancel the tragedy and pain, but it teaches us to look beyond the present moment without forgetting it.”

Under a brilliant sun and blue sky, survivors and relatives later planned to place a wreath in the water where the hulking liner finally came to rest on its side off Giglio’s coast. The Concordia’s captain, Francesco Schettino, is serving a 16-year prison sentence for having ordered the crew to take the ship off course to come closer to Giglio in a stunt. He then delayed an evacuation order and abandoned ship before all the passengers and crew were evacuated. The 10th anniversary is also recalling how the residents of Giglio took in the 4,200 passengers and crew, giving them food, blankets and a place to rest, and then lived with the Concordia’s wrecked carcass for another two years until it was righted and hauled away for scrap.

Those residents gave a warm welcome to Kevin Rebello, whose brother Russel Rebello, a Concordia waiter, was the last person unaccounted- for.- (AP)