But the most analyzed number to emerge from the elections, held in 941 cities, was the low turnout: 51.3 percent.

“Never like now have Italians placed under indictment an ailing political system that resists any attempt at reform,” the political commentator Stefano Folli wrote Tuesday in a front page essay in the economic daily Il Sole 24 Ore. “If we add the abstentions to the protest vote, which was variously expressed, we have a system that is partially delegitimized.”

Though it triumphed only in Parma and three smaller towns, the undisputed winner of the vote was the Five Star Movement, a fledgling grass-roots alliance of citizens committed to changing Italy’s entrenched political system by offering an Internet-driven, consensus-based alternative. The average age of the four mayors elected from the movement was 31 years, about half the average age of Parliament.

Ideologically driven by Beppe Grillo, a comedian turned political muckraker, the movement advocates direct participation in political decision-making, sharing documents and knowledge with citizens, and inviting constant feedback.

Parma’s mayor-elect, Federico Pizzarotti, told cheering supporters that he would be the people’s representative. “I think we can give an example to Italy, and to Europe, of what can be done if we work together,” he said. “From Day One, I will be at your service, and I hope you will be at mine, too.”

The elections rang the loudest warning bell for the two parties that governed Italy until last November, People of Liberty and the Northern League.

The federalist Northern League, racked by scandal and internal conflict, held on to Verona but lost many former strongholds.

People of Liberty has struggled to forge a new identity detached from that of its founder, former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. It held on to only 6 of the 15 major cities it governed going into the vote. Many lawmakers from the party grumble that it has lost popular support because it backs Prime Minister Mario Monti and his austerity agenda.

The center-left Democratic Party, which also backs the government, fared better, finding its footing in many cities, in particular in Lombardy. But heedful of a growing malaise among Italian voters, the party leader, Luigi Bersani, said Tuesday that the government had to push for a more social agenda. “It’s evident that there is an lot of unease around,” he told the news agency Ansa. “The government has to give the sensation that it understands.”

Writing in the Milan daily Corriere della Sera, another commentator, Massimo Franco, called on the political forces to make the effort to better scrutinize “the dynamics of an Italy that has sent the last warning before the eviction.”

Courtesy Newyourk Times

The tumultuous scenes of the end of the world in Signorelli’s frescoes at the Duomo feature scores of nude figures as they had never been seen before (or since), along with “angels, demons, ruins, earthquakes, fires, miracles of the Antichrist, and many other such things.” The paintings still have the power to astonish visitors today, yet the artist whose works “Michelangelo always praised above all others,” as Vasari said, now is comparatively little known.

Born around 1450 in Cortona in Tuscany, near the border with Umbria, the artist spent much of his career in this neighboring region, and it is Umbria that is hosting “Luca Signorelli,” a long overdue exhibition devoted to him (the last monographic show, in his hometown and Florence, was in 1953), with a trio of shows in Perugia, Orvieto and Città di Castello.

Signorelli, according to the mathematician Luca Pacioli, “was a worthy disciple” of Piero della Francesca, from whom Luca would have learned mathematical perspective and other techniques. The Perugia show, of the three the one with the largest number of moveable works, opens with Piero’s “Madonna di Senigallia,” dated to the 1470s, and two pictures of the Virgin and Child (on loan from Oxford and Venice), attributed to Signorelli and unmistakably in the style of his master.

Other formative influences are well illustrated by works of the Umbrian artist Perugino and the Florentines Andrea del Verrocchio and Bartolomeo della Gatta.

By the time he was in his late 20s or early 30s Signorelli’s talents had been recognized: In the early 1480s he was called to the Sistine Chapel in Rome to contribute to the frescoes being painted there by Perugino and a team of Florentine and Umbrian artists. Signorelli’s hand has been discerned in two scenes in the chapel — “The Testament of Moses” and “Christ Giving the Keys to St. Peter” — and these works are represented in Perugia by fine 19th-century watercolor copies of the frescoes, from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

In the central room of the show, the artist emerges as an independent master, displaying that “bizarre and fanciful invention,” as Vasari put it, that was to help lend his work its originality and lasting appeal.

This is also the point in his career when Signorelli’s new race of boldly modeled and candidly presented nudes — which were to have such a telling effect not only on Michelangelo, but also on Raphael and other artists of the High Renaissance — start to become a regular presence in his works.

Signorelli’s earliest surviving monumental work, the “Sant’Onofrio Altarpiece,” normally in Perugia’s Duomo, is displayed here.

Commissioned by Bishop Jacopo Vannucci (also from Cortona), it offers clear evidence that Signorelli had spent time in Florence familiarizing himself with the latest trends there and studying some of the Flemish works then in the Tuscan capital. At the same time the altarpiece manifests an idiosyncratic and lively personal vision. The near-naked angel, with his childish pot belly, intent on tuning a lute at the foot of the Madonna, is a particularly charming image of nudity as a symbol of unselfconscious innocence.

“The Medici Tondo,“ commissioned by Lorenzo de Medici and on loan from the Uffizi, is remarkable in setting the Virgin and Child against an idyllic pastoral backdrop of lithe, near-naked youths and a grazing horse. This blending of Christian and pagan motifs reflects the Neo-Platonic, classicizing tastes of the Medicean world and probably dates from 1484, the same year as Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus,” which once hung with it in the Castello Medici country villa, according to later documentary evidence.

Courtesy Newyourk Times

Melissa’s flower-laden white coffin lay in the center of the apse, while her father looked on, holding a wedding-day photograph of his wife, who was too distraught to attend. More than a thousand others listened to the rite on loudspeakers set up in the square outside.

“I stand here and I am still scared,” Dora Persano murmured in the crowded churchyard before the funeral began. “She could have been my daughter. This is what all mothers here think now. We can no longer think that our kids are going to the safest place — to school. We now know that they could die when they go to school.”

The bombing shocked Italy, raising specters of turbulent years past. Investigators said there were no formal suspects. They are looking at various hypotheses: the involvement of the Mafia, domestic terrorism and the act of a single individual, which has emerged as one of the most accredited theories.

On Monday, newspapers printed blurry images of a man suspected of having placed the bomb in a trash canister next to the school’s main gate early Saturday, before classes began.

But speaking at a news conference after a high-level meeting of investigators, the justice minister, Paola Severino, said no hypothesis could be excluded. “Nothing is certain,” she said.

Interior Minister Annamaria Cancellieri asked the journalists present to reassure the public that the government was in control of the investigations and that Italy was not a country at risk of terrorist actions.

At the school site on Monday morning, however, groups of teenagers stood in an eerie silence looking at the wall blackened by the explosion. Beyond police fences, the blanket of multicolored flowers and plants lay on the sidewalk, broken up by a teddy bear, a blue scarf of the local soccer team, white balloons and many messages. “You are only murderers,” one read.

“We all feel very unsafe,” said Annarita, 16, who declined to give her last name. “I go to a different school, but I felt it was important to be here today rather than in my classroom.”

While men cleaned up the debris from the blast, adults held students and whispered in their ears.

“These kids need to win over this terrorism; this is why I convinced my daughter to come to school today,” said Cristina Bataccia, whose daughter got to school later than usual on Saturday and avoided the blast. “But my knees are shaking while I stand here. We won’t feel safe until they catch the murderer.”

Closed-circuit security cameras recorded a man in a white shirt and dark trousers who was standing next to a kiosk less than 50 paces from the blast and apparently pushed a device that could have been a detonator.

“This inhuman gesture just leaves me speechless,” the school’s dean, Angelo Rampino, said with a broken voice on Monday morning at the school gate. “I don’t know what to tell them.”

Courtesy Newyourk Times

But Mr. Dinapoli, while underlining that all hypotheses remained open, said that preliminary investigations seemed to rule out the involvement of the Mafia, though the involvement of the Sacra Corona Unita, the local organized crime group, could not be entirely discounted.

“We just believe it is improbable,” he said.

Video captured by closed-circuit security cameras showed a man lingering in the area on Saturday just before 7:45 a.m., the time the bomb went off, holding a device that Mr. Dinapoli said could have been a detonator. The man had not been identified, he said.

The student who was killed was identified as Melissa Bassi. Five others were seriously injured and hospitalized.

“An isolated act is a likely hypothesis,” Mr. Dinapoli said. He also said that the perpetrator might have been a man “at war with the world,” who was “venting his rage,” perhaps for ideological reasons.

Other investigators were more circumspect, preferring not to rule out anything.

“We don’t have any specific indications” in any one direction, said Cataldo Motta, an anti-Mafia prosecutor from Lecce, about 20 miles southeast of Brindisi, who is also investigating the case. “Not only do we still have to figure out the motive, but everything else as well,” he said on Italian television.

Pietro Grasso, the prosecutor who leads the national anti-Mafia judicial agency, said on Sunday that investigations were still at a “very delicate” early phase and that “all hypotheses were still under examination.”

In the immediate moments and hours that followed the blast, which rocked a drab Brindisi neighborhood at the start of the school day, fears had been high that the country was at risk of the extremist violence — both domestic and mob induced — that shook Italy in the past.

But many investigators and experts had remarked on the nature of the attack, which did not correspond to the modus operandi of either the Mafia or domestic terrorist groups.

Police officials said on Sunday that various witnesses had been interrogated, but that they had not spoken to anyone who was officially a suspect.

Mr. Dinapoli said that he was comforted by the fact that “the best investigators in Italy” had been put on the case.

In Mesagne, outside Brindisi, where the slain teenager had lived, locals gathered Sunday in front of the main cathedral. Don Luigi Ciotti, a priest and the president of the anti-Mafia association Libera, gave the homily at a morning service.

“We need courage,” he said. “I am begging you to break the silence, the conspiracy of silence, even your resignation.”

In the front row, Melissa’s father sobbed into his hands.

Gaia Pianigiani reported from Brindisi, and Elisabetta Povoledo from Rome.

Courtesy Newyourk Times

Melissa’s flower-laden white coffin lay in the center of the apse, while her father looked on, holding a wedding-day photograph of his wife, who was too distraught to attend. More than a thousand others listened to the rite on loudspeakers set up in the square outside.

“I stand here and I am still scared,” Dora Persano murmured in the crowded churchyard before the funeral began. “She could have been my daughter. This is what all mothers here think now. We can no longer think that our kids are going to the safest place — to school. We now know that they could die when they go to school.”

The bombing shocked Italy, raising specters of turbulent years past. Investigators said that there are no formal suspects. They are looking at various hypotheses: the involvement of the Mafia, domestic terrorism and the act of a single individual, which has emerged as one of the most accredited theories.

On Monday, newspapers printed blurry images of a man suspected of having placed the bomb in a trash canister next to the school’s main gate early Saturday, before classes began.

But speaking at a news conference after a high-level meeting of investigators, the justice minister, Paola Severino, said no hypothesis could be excluded. “Nothing is certain,” she said.

Interior Minister Annamaria Cancellieri asked the journalists present to reassure the public that the government was in control of the investigations and that Italy was not a country at risk of terrorist actions.

At the school site on Monday morning, however, groups of teenagers stood in an eerie silence looking at the wall blackened by the explosion. Beyond police fences, the blanket of multicolored flowers and plants lay on the sidewalk, broken up by a teddy bear, a blue scarf of the local soccer team, white balloons and many messages. “You are only murderers,” one read.

“We all feel very unsafe,” said Annarita, 16, who declined to give her last name. “I go to a different school, but I felt it was important to be here today rather than in my classroom.”

While men cleaned up the debris from the blast, adults held students and whispered in their ears.

“These kids need to win over this terrorism; this is why I convinced my daughter to come to school today,” said Cristina Bataccia, whose 17-year-old daughter arrived at school later than usual on Saturday and avoided the blast by minutes. “But my knees are shaking while I stand here. We won’t feel safe until they catch the murderer.”

Closed-circuit security cameras recorded a man in a white shirt and dark trousers who was standing next to a kiosk less than 50 paces from the blast and apparently pushed a device that could have been a detonator.

“This inhuman gesture just leaves me speechless,” the school’s dean, Angelo Rampino, said with a broken voice on Monday morning at the school gate. “I don’t know what to tell them.”

Mr. Rampino, who said he had seen the various recordings of the cameras, singled out the man’s coldness.

“He waited for the blast,” Mr. Rampino said, “and then just walked away, through the buildings here.”

Courtesy Newyourk Times

The president of Emilia-Romagna, Vasco Errani, said in a television interview that it was too soon to determine the economic costs of the earthquake. “They will be very significant, between our cultural heritage and businesses and housing, but we prefer to wait until we have more complete data,” he said.

An early estimate of $250 million worth of damage — made by Coldiretti, an agricultural trade association — included 400,000 wheels of Parmesan that were destroyed when the shelves on which they were aging collapsed. The cheese is a principal export of Emilia-Romagna.

Teams of experts coordinated by the Culture Ministry began to assess churches, towers and other historic buildings, including the Ducal Palace in Mantua, which suffered damage, though not to the famed frescoes by the 15th-century painter Andrea Mantegna. Thousands of structures must be painstakingly examined to determine whether they might collapse.

Volunteers patrolled the streets in front of abandoned buildings to deter would-be looters.

“The immediate priority is to determine who can return to their homes,” said Fabrizio Toselli, the mayor of Sant’Agostino, a town of 6,000. A vast gaping hole in the front wall of its town hall has become a defining image of the earthquake’s devastation.

Mr. Toselli said that he spent the night with about 250 people in a makeshift dormitory in the civic sports center, and that many others slept in their cars. “Their homes may be safe, but they’re still very afraid, so many decided to sleep outside,” he said.

Donations from various parts of Italy have been used to create several scattered tent camps to house the more than 6,000 people who for the moment cannot sleep in their homes, according to official numbers.

Italy’s Civil Protection Department responded quickly to the emergency, and Luigi D’Angelo, a senior official with the department, said that local mayors had also acted promptly and effectively, in accordance with the national emergency management system drafted to deal with natural disasters. “Mayors did their part, and that is important in these situations,” he said.

In 2009, a major earthquake in L’Aquila, in the central Abruzzo region, caused more than 300 deaths and devastated entire towns, including the art-rich regional capital. The earthquake on Sunday was easier to manage, because rescue teams were able to focus on clearing rubble, rather than digging for survivors.

“They were two different experiences with different levels of damage,” Mr. D’Angelo said. “But in both cases rescue operations intervened immediately.”

Courtesy Newyourk Times

Despite efforts at official reassurance, no one really knows the consequences of a Greek exit from the euro zone, or how rapidly big countries like Spain and Italy, and their banks, will feel the effects.

However cavalierly some European officials talk of “managing” a Greek exit, the political and financial costs would represent a fundamental challenge to the European Union and its credibility, and the point of no return may be approaching faster than anyone anticipated.

“Anyone who thinks a Greek departure would be cleansing and not cause systemic contagion is deluding themselves,” said Simon Tilford, chief economist at the Center for European Reform in London. “Already we’ve seen a sharp increase in spreads and the beginnings of capital flight in other struggling euro zone economies,” with the risk of a full-blown banking crisis in Spain, where 16 banks and four regions have just been downgraded by Moody’s Investor Service.

The stresses on the system are now so great that to contain panic and contagion, while protecting countries too big to bail out, would require political choices and financial commitments that many countries, including Germany, Finland and the Netherlands, seem unlikely to make — the prime reason they would prefer that Greece remain.

The problems of Greece and Spain are complicated enough, but the pressure on euro zone leaders to resolve the evident contradictions in the common currency and to move faster toward more political and fiscal integration is rising by the day. The election of François Hollande, a committed European, as president of France may help push Berlin toward more collective responsibility for the euro zone, but Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, with her own domestic political concerns, has rarely been willing to move quickly or boldly, which many believe has prolonged and deepened the euro crisis.

Even the British prime minister, David Cameron, warned Europe of the urgent need to fix its economic imbalances and structure. Britain is outside the euro zone and has no intention of joining, so Mr. Cameron’s words were resented. But they rang loudly. Europe, he said, “either has to make up, or it is looking at a potential breakup.”

While Greece is only a small part of the euro zone — and European officials concede it should not have been allowed to join in the first place — its exit is likely to be more expensive and complicated than figuring out a way for it to remain. That would be subject, of course, to Greek voters producing a functioning government in new parliamentary elections on June 17.

Ms. Merkel is now talking of special stimulus programs for Greece to help ease the pain of austerity, but any new deal with Athens will have to be negotiated with a real government, and there is no guarantee that the next elections will produce a working majority. They might even lead to a governing coalition that is hostile to the loan agreement that Germany has insisted is not open to significant renegotiation.

In the interim, as European officials try to send strong messages to Greek voters about the consequences of an exit, a continuing run on Greek banks — a panic that threatened to spread to Spain last week — could force the European Central Bank to jettison Greece anyway by refusing to replace the euros fleeing the country for lack of proper collateral.

European finance officials are trying to be reassuring about a Greek exit, saying that most Greek debt is now held by nations, which can afford the loss if necessary, and that better firewalls exist to protect the rest of the euro zone, and so that the impact on the world economy will be manageable. But while Europe is better prepared for a Greek restructuring of its debt — writing down what is currently held by states and the European bailout funds — a Greek departure is likely to be seen as the beginning of the end for the whole euro zone project, a major accomplishment, whatever its faults, in the postwar construction of a Europe “whole and at peace.”

“A Greek exit should be avoided; it will be very disruptive and disorderly, and not just for the Greeks,” said Nicolas Véron, an economist at Bruegel, a research and policy institute, in Brussels and the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “It’s a classic clash between moral and economic attitudes. A neighbor may keep starting fires, which is exasperating, but if you know his fire is going to run to your roof you have to act to put it out. Leaders need to make hard calculations about what is best for everyone.”

Daniela Schwarzer, a European Union expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, said that a Greek default, within the European Union or without, would be costly, requiring a write-down of much of the debt held by European states and the European Central Bank, which member states would then have to recapitalize. But that is just the financial expense, which is the least of it.

More important is “to avoid the first example of European Union membership not being forever,” Ms. Schwarzer said. “If that taboo is broken, I think there will be considerable contagion,” including unsustainable spikes in the bond market; further runs on the banks in Spain, Portugal and Italy; and social and political unrest beyond Greece.

Courtesy Newyourk Times

Three men working the night shift in two factories on the outskirts of Sant’Agostino died when the buildings collapsed. Another death was reported outside of Bondeno, and the Civil Protection Department said that a woman had died of causes resulting from the shock of the quake.

Giovanni Gregori, an earthquake expert with Italy’s National Research Council, said on Sky News Italia that given the magnitude of the earthquake, the death toll “could have been much worse.”

Another tremor, initially measured at a magnitude of 5.1 by the Geological Survey, caused further damage on Sunday afternoon, toppling other structures and hampering the work of rescue teams.

Prime Minister Mario Monti, who is in the United States for high-level meetings with leaders from the Group of 8 nations and NATO, said on Sunday that he would return to Italy earlier than intended because of the emergency.

Many areas of Italy are considered to be at a high risk for earthquakes. A quake in 1976 killed nearly 1,000 people in Friuli Venezia Giulia, and almost 3,000 died in the Campania earthquake of 1980.

Three years ago, an earthquake in the area of L’Aquila, in central Italy, killed more than 300 people. While rebuilding in the region is under way in many villages, the historic center of L’Aquila remains a ghost town, and there has been a public outcry over delays in reconstruction there.

But in Emilia Romagna, seismic events have been rare. Mr. Gregori said the last earthquake of a similar magnitude was in the 14th century. “For man, seven centuries are a lot; for nature, it is nothing,” he said.

Other scientists cited an earthquake that severely damaged Ferrara in 1570. “We’re not used to events of this kind,” said Giovanni Morandi, editor in chief of Il Resto Del Carlino, a local daily newspaper.

Aftershocks occurred throughout Sunday. The main earthquake was felt throughout northern and central Italy. “For hundreds of kilometers, there was a considerable release of energy,” said Stefano Gresta, a geophysicist and president of the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology.

Mr. Gresta said that aftershocks could continue for days, “and we can’t even exclude a significant quake like the one this morning.”

Areas in some of the hardest-hit towns, scattered across a vast area of Italy’s agricultural heartland, were cordoned off, and officials expressed concern about the stability of some historic buildings.

After an initial survey of cultural monuments and churches, the government said that the damage had been extensive. Culture Ministry experts were working with officials from the Civil Protection Department and firefighters to monitor the situation, and three state museums in Ferrara had been closed, the ministry said.

Engineers and surveyors were inspecting roads and bridges, said Stefano Vaccari, the lawmaker who oversees the civil protection agency for Modena Province. Railway lines, roads and telecommunications had returned to normal, except along secondary train line, the Civil Protection Department said.

Officials said that schools would be closed for several days, and that makeshift camps equipped to house hundreds of people would be set up for those in need of shelter.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 20, 2012

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the location of two regions in Italy. Liguria is on the country’s west coast, not east and Friuli Venezia Giulia is in Italy’s east, not west.

Courtesy Newyourk Times

Three men working the night shift in two factories on the outskirts of Sant’Agostino died when the buildings collapsed. Another death was reported outside of Bondeno, and the Civil Protection Department said that a woman had died of causes resulting from the shock of the quake.

Giovanni Gregori, an earthquake expert with Italy’s National Research Council, said on Sky News Italia that given the magnitude of the earthquake, the death toll “could have been much worse.”

Another tremor, initially measured at a magnitude of 5.1 by the Geological Survey, caused further damage on Sunday afternoon, toppling other structures and hampering the work of rescue teams.

Prime Minister Mario Monti, who is in the United States for high-level meetings with leaders from the Group of 8 nations and NATO, said on Sunday that he would return to Italy earlier than intended because of the emergency.

Many areas of Italy are considered to be at a high risk for earthquakes. A quake in 1976 killed nearly 1,000 people in Friuli Venezia Giulia, and almost 3,000 died in the Campania earthquake of 1980.

Three years ago, an earthquake in the area of L’Aquila, in central Italy, killed more than 300 people. While rebuilding in the region is under way in many villages, the historic center of L’Aquila remains a ghost town, and there has been a public outcry over delays in reconstruction there.

But in Emilia Romagna, seismic events have been rare. Mr. Gregori said the last earthquake of a similar magnitude was in the 14th century. “For man, seven centuries are a lot; for nature, it is nothing,” he said.

Other scientists cited an earthquake that severely damaged Ferrara in 1570. “We’re not used to events of this kind,” said Giovanni Morandi, editor in chief of Il Resto Del Carlino, a local daily newspaper.

Aftershocks occurred throughout Sunday. The main earthquake was felt throughout northern and central Italy. “For hundreds of kilometers, there was a considerable release of energy,” said Stefano Gresta, a geophysicist and president of the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology.

Mr. Gresta said that aftershocks could continue for days, “and we can’t even exclude a significant quake like the one this morning.”

Areas in some of the hardest-hit towns, scattered across a vast area of Italy’s agricultural heartland, were cordoned off, and officials expressed concern about the stability of some historic buildings.

After an initial survey of cultural monuments and churches, the government said that the damage had been extensive. Culture Ministry experts were working with officials from the Civil Protection Department and firefighters to monitor the situation, and three state museums in Ferrara had been closed, the ministry said.

Engineers and surveyors were inspecting roads and bridges, said Stefano Vaccari, the lawmaker who oversees the civil protection agency for Modena Province. Railway lines, roads and telecommunications had returned to normal, except along secondary train line, the Civil Protection Department said.

Officials said that schools would be closed for several days, and that makeshift camps equipped to house hundreds of people would be set up for those in need of shelter.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 20, 2012

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the location of two regions in Italy. Liguria is on the country’s west coast, not east and Friuli Venezia Giulia is in Italy’s east, not west.

Courtesy Newyourk Times

“This is the largest ship removal by weight in history,” Rich Habib, Titan’s managing director, told reporters in Rome. “The magnitude of the job and the magnitude of the techniques used are something unprecedented.”

The operation is estimated to cost at least $300 million, more than half the value of the ship, and will be covered by its operator’s insurers.

Ships like the Costa Concordia “are the biggest industrial objects built to move in the world,” said Emilio Campana, the director of the research institute for naval and maritime engineering at Italy’s National Research Council. “Their gigantism creates the main challenge to this operation, because it’s like raising from the ground a floating city. It’s very delicate and complex.”

The 951-foot-long Costa Concordia is estimated to weigh 54,000 tons, 6,000 of which are the water and debris that have been cramming its 17 decks for four months. Raising such a tremendous weight from its right side, now deformed by the granite rocks underneath, has to be an inch-by-inch movement, experts said. Just rolling it onto the platform will take a few days, the company said.

“It would have been easier to cut it up in sections, but it’d have produced a tremendous amount of debris,” said Joseph Farrell Jr., chief executive of Resolve Marine Group, based in the United States, which had also bid to salvage the Costa Concordia. “Authorities wanted to have it removed in one hunk.”

Salvagers are set to stabilize the wreck by the end of August and then start building the underwater platform to help rotate the vessel. According to the companies’ schedule, the ship will be rotated at the beginning of December and floated one month later.

All operations, including the removal of all the structures on site, are expected to take up to a year, a long time for a tourism-dependent island, Giglio, that is now approaching its peak season. To minimize the operations’ impacts, the equipment will be stored at the nearby Tuscan port of Piombino.

During the work, oil-response devices will be in place, and salvagers will monitor the quality of the water daily and clear any debris that might come out of the vessel. After removal, a protected type of sea grass surrounding the pylons needed to anchor the ship will be replanted.

While some argue that the strong winds and waves of another winter could cause the ship to slide into the 300-foot-deep sea bottom, the local authorities agree that sea and weather conditions capable of significantly moving the ship are unlikely.

In January, the vessel’s captain, Francesco Schettino, steered the ship, carrying 4,229 people, too close to shore, where it hit a rock and capsized, killing 32. Two bodies are still missing. Since then, the Costa Concordia has been resting in a relatively stable position, and the winds and waves are not very strong in the nine-mile-wide channel between the island and the mainland, the authorities said.

“Of course we are worried about next winter and the impact of the salvage on the seabed, but there is no way out,” said Mayor Sergio Ortelli of Giglio. “There is a huge, extraneous object right off our harbor. Leaving it there is by far a larger damage to our environment and our economy.”

Courtesy Newyourk Times