Nothing much ever happened on Giglio before the doomed cruise liner crashed here on that fateful Friday the 13th in January 2012. There were the odd inconveniences, like when bad weather stopped the ferries and cut off the island from the mainland, leaving the local population of about 900 people with limited supplies.
The island had its fair share of tourists, but according to Mayor Sergio Ortelli, Germans came to camp and there were pockets of British who came to bird watch, but none of them left much of an impact. “We were a perfect place, a best kept secret,” he told CNN.
That all changed shortly after the Concordia ran aground, killing 32 passengers and crew as it capsized and then sank into the pristine coral reefs near the harbor on the eastern side of Giglio.
Within a few weeks of the disaster, foreign salvage crews moved in, first to defuel the crippled vessel and later to remove it. Italian with a Tuscan accent was no longer the language of commerce on the island. If the local businesses wanted to cater to the crews — some 600 workers from 29 different countries at the height of the operation– they had to learn at least a little bit of English, Dutch, German or Spanish. The languages have infiltrated the local dialect.
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“The platforms will be dismantled,” Galletti told CNN, before adding that this was an Italian decision — not one that could be made solely by the people of Giglio. “We have always hypothesized from the beginning that Giglio would be returned to the same state as it was before the shipwreck and there were no platforms before the shipwreck.”
Franca Melis, who owns a popular restaurant in Castello and a dive company in Giglio’s port, disagrees. “It is a mistake to remove them when we could have one of the best dive sites in the world if we leave them,” she told CNN. “It will disrupt the seabed for another two years to pull them out, like a rotten tooth from the seabed. Let’s try to see the bright side and use them to bolster the local economy.”
“When the ship is gone, it will be like this island is dying twice. Let’s try to save ourselves. We are going to die here without that boat.”
READ MORE: How the Costa Concordia was raised
