Umberto Trotti still remembers the terrified screams of his wife and children as he jumped from the Costa Concordia into a lifeboat to join them.
“It was instinct, my family needed me. I jumped from a height of 3 or 4 meters”, he says.
“I fell on top of a German, poor man”, he tells AFP on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the shipwreck.
The huge luxury cruise ship ran aground on the night of January 13, 2012 off the island of Giglio in Tuscany in icy waters, killing 32 people.
The Trotti family is reluctant to return to the island for the official ceremony organized on Thursday, which includes a candlelit march.
Ship sirens and island church bells will ring at 9:45 pm (5:45 pm GMT) to remember the moment the ship hit the reefs.
Umberto Trotti, 44, and his wife Fjorda, 33, returned a year after the tragedy, but the experience was traumatic.
The couple had chosen that cruise to celebrate their honeymoon together with their two-year-old daughter Francesca and six-month-old baby Carlo.
“It was supposed to be the best moment of our lives,” says Umberto.
“Those who weren’t on board will never understand. I was in shock, walking like a zombie,” he admits.
The Concordia, which was carrying 4,229 people from around 70 countries, ran aground while many passengers were dining.
The ship’s captain, Francesco Schettino, sentenced to 16 years in prison, was slow to issue an alert and was also one of the first to abandon the vessel.
Panic took hold as the power was cut, plunging the ship into total darkness.
The evacuation began more than an hour after the collision, when the lifeboats on one side of the ship were already unusable.
– “Enormous betrayal” –
“We were saved by a cook from Como” (northern Italy), recalls Trotti, who was having dinner with the whole family in one of the ship’s restaurants at the time of the accident.
Paolo Maspero, who still wore the chef’s hat, “took my six-month-old son in his arms and … took us outside. The water was rising. If he hadn’t helped, we’d all be dead,” recalls Trotti, who can’t swim.
In footage filmed and later released by the Coast Guard, divers can be seen scouring the flooded restaurant looking for victims.
On deck number 5, pianist Antimo Magnotta fell when the ship suddenly tipped to one side.
Along with other crew members, he found himself surrounded by terrified passengers.
“I saw a woman with two small children. It looked like a tigress, a lioness, practically attacked me. She yelled at me: ‘You have to tell me what to do to save my children,’” Magnotta, author of a book recounting the experience, told AFP.
The musician tried to reassure passengers by stating that the captain was about to make an announcement.
“I promised them. But Schettino never spoke. It was a huge betrayal.”
The 51-year-old pianist finally made it off the ship, but two of his friends died that night.
Magnotta, who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, decided to move to London, where he found work as a waiter.
He would love to perform again on the island of Giglio, but is unable to forgive Schettino, “because he never apologized” for leaving the ship when hundreds of passengers were still on board, violating the most elementary rule of navigation.
The former captain was convicted in 2015 of manslaughter, abandonment of ship and environmental disaster.
He has appealed to the European Court of Human Rights and his lawyers are expected to ask this year that he serve the remainder of his sentence at home for good behavior.
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