A close-up of the damaged side. Photo: Tony Gentile/Reuters

The crippled Costa Concordia cruise ship was pulled completely upright early yesterday after a complicated, 19-hour operation to wrench it from its side where it capsized last year off Tuscany.

Officials declared it a “perfect” end to a daring and unprecedented engineering feat.

Shortly after 4am local time, a foghorn wailed on Giglio island and the head of Italy’s civil protection agency, Franco Gabrielli, announced that the ship had reached vertical and the operation to rotate it – known in nautical terms as “parbuckling” – was complete.

“We completed the parbuckling operation a few minutes ago the way we thought it would happen and the way we hoped it would happen,” said Franco Porcellacchia, project manager for the Concordia’s owner, Costa Crociere SpA.

“A perfect operation, I must say,” with no environmental spill detected so far, he said.

Applause rang out among fire fighters in the tent where Mr Gabrielli and other project engineers made the announcement.

The Concordia rammed into a reef off Giglio on January 13, 2012, after the captain brought it too close to shore. It drifted, listed and capsized just off the island’s port, killing 32 people. Two bodies were never recovered.

The operation to right it had been expected to take no more than 12 hours, but dragged on after some initial delays with the vast system of steel cables, pulleys and counterweights.

The final phase of the rotation went remarkably fast as gravity began to kick in and pull the ship toward its normal position.

Parbuckling is a standard operation to right capsized ships but had never before been used on such a huge cruise liner. The ship is expected to be floated away from Giglio in the spring and turned into scrap.