This caused the ship to list and then to partially sink, landing unevenly on an underwater ledge. Although a six-hour rescue effort brought most of the passengers ashore, 33 people died: 27 passengers, five crew, and, later, a member of the salvage team.

The actual "parbuckling" operation to pull the capsized Costa Concordia upright took approximately 19 hours. On September 16, 2013, engineers began the unprecedented task of rotating the 114,500-ton vessel, which had been resting on its side for 20 months off the coast of Giglio, Italy. The process was slower than the originally estimated 12 hours due to initial delays with the complex system of steel cables and pulleys. Once the ship reached a 65-degree rotation, gravity helped it settle onto an artificial undersea platform. This "lifting" was just one phase of the massive salvage project; the entire recovery effort, from the initial disaster in January 2012 to the final towing of the ship to Genoa for scrapping in July 2014, spanned over two and a half years and cost over $1.2 billion, making it the most expensive maritime salvage in history.