The Costa Concordia cruise ship will be scrapped in Italy.

By Eleanor Biles

GIGLIO Italy (Reuters) The wreckage of the Costa Concordia luxury cruise ship was brought back to the surface on Monday, prepared to be towed and used as scrap metal, two and a half years after the vessel capsized off the Italian coast, killing 32 people.

The rusty hull of the 290-meter ship, which struck rocks near the island of Giglio in Tuscany while performing a display maneuver, had been on a temporary platform since it was righted a year ago.

In what became one of the largest shipwreck recovery operations in history, air was pumped into 30 large metal boxes attached to the hull of the 114,5-ton ship. The air expelled the water from these boxes, lifting the vessel off the underwater platform.

"The boat is now afloat with the 'sponsors' (metal boxes) attached to it," said Franco Porcellacchia, the engineer in charge of the operation.

"The ship is straight and is not tilting either lengthwise or latitudinally. This is very positive," he said at a press conference after the operation began.

After the ship has been raised by about two meters, it will be further stabilized using chains and cables, and tugboats will move it about 30 meters to a port, where it will be prepared to be towed in a few days to Genoa, in northern Italy, and then turned into scrap metal.

The ship's captain, Francesco Schettino, is on trial, accused of manslaughter for causing the shipwreck by sailing too close to the beach to "greet" the port and abandoning ship. He denies the charges.

The person who will pay for the disaster, including the dismantling of the vessel and damages caused to Giglio, will most likely be the ship's owner, the cruise operator Costa Crociere, a unit of Carnival Corp CCL.N, which is expected to bear a cost of more than 1,5 billion euros ($2,05 billion), the company's chief executive said last week.

(By Philip Pullella)