Thanks Mickey - nice work, much appreciated !
I also love this other pasSIMger (let's not call them VicSims in this case - they're not even supposed to be dead!) :
3299 O'REGAN STEPHEN MARTIN JOHN MARTIN JOHN
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MrSinclair wrote:Real people with the affluence for cruise ships would have family arriving on the island would they not? Simon and Heiwa, did you see any family on the island?
Exactly my thoughts, Mr. Sinclair.
In fact, when Heiwa and I went to Giglio island (only one week after the fact), I kept roaming around in the tiny little port, talking to several people and listening in to conversations all along our five-hour stay on the island (Heiwa can testify to that!). I have the good fortune to speak/understand seven-and-a-half languages - so I'm a pretty decent 'international spy' if you will, hehe!. Evidently, the vast majority of the little crowd at hand (apart from the local police/firefighters/military folks) were nothing but media people, from Italy, France, Germany, Denmark, Japan - you name it. Now, we're talking about less than a couple of hundred people in all - gathered in a very small and friendly seaside port. To make a long story short, did I meet/hear/see anyone resembling an anguished family member? No. Not one!
As it is, the only
'clear sign of a family having visited the island' (being sarcastic now), were these 2 "MISSING" posters stitched on the entrance/and inside the local church, supposedly placed there by "i familiari" (the family members) of
Giuseppe Girolamo: as the (Italian media) story goes, the guy was a drummer of a Costa Concordia music band...who heroically abandoned his lifeboat seat - to make space for a woman and her child - and thereafter went mysteriously missing...

Photo by Simon Shack

Photo by Simon Shack
The
Giuseppe Girolamo "hero story" is of course inanely silly - for a number of reasons:
- Giuseppe was therefore NOT trapped in the ship. He was safely outside the ship and had stepped into a lifeboat.
- Did he fall overboard and didn't know how to swim? The sea was calm and the shore was a stonethrow away!
- Why did whoever witnessed this happening - and lived to tell the tale - not do anything about it? Who is this person anyway?