Amygdala

You know how you believe something for years and you even say it occasionally when drunk and everyone tells you to be quiet or looks at you in horror and your partner shakes their head and then one day something happens that absolutely proves your broad-brush generalization was spot on all along?

Well that’s what the capsize of the Concordia cruise liner does for all those who’ve been watching Italy and wondering how to resurrect the national truths first revealed to us by World War II, ‘Allo ‘Allo and the latest Dolmio adverts. Forget Berlusconi: he was so over the top he made a mockery of serious stereotyping. And forget the financial crisis – we’ve all been as profligate and in denial as the Italians.

But then along comes Captain Francesco Schettino to reaffirm our core beliefs about the land of the Hesperides.

First, let’s just check out what he looks like. I will leave you to form your own opinions. To me it looks as though Colonel Gadaffi has decided his uniform should be made out of swans.

This slightly dishevelled man in his satisfyingly rubbish outfit took his ship several miles off the company-approved route to indulge in a fly-past of the island of Giglio to pay homage to Mario Palumbo, a former chief of the company’s fleet and presumably the man who got him his job (he started as a security officer). This is just the mix of reckless bravado, sentimentality and mafiose love of hierarchical ritual that we’d expect. It was also apparently a little gift from Schettino as capo to his sgarrista, the maitre d’ of the ship’s restaurant, whose family is from Giglio and whose sister posted advance notice of the manoeuvre on Facebook.

Now, to be fair, the ship has been videoed under Schettino’s command pulling this stunt before, and since the GPS position information is logged on board and is public on sites like marinetraffic.com, it’s hard to believe the company’s protestations that it knew nothing of this sort of behaviour. Palumbo himself has admitted to the exact same stunt. Still, Schettino added a couple of his own, peculiarly Italian tweaks to make the whole thing more stereotypically satisfying.

First, he decided to show off his skippering skills to a mystery woman. Despite the fact that the ship was travelling at 15 knots was being taken to within half a boatlength of an unlit reef, Schettino, who it turns out was actually on the bridge at the time of the accident, decided that he’d just eyeball the turn needed to avoid catastrophe. The ship is the size of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier and when it turns the stern swings out dramatically even without the effects of wind and current. The speed and position of the stern are not the same as the speed and position of the ship nor is the sterm moving in the same direction. It seems that Schettino’s handbrake turn failed to take this into account. Perhaps he was trying to impress his companion.

Second, Schettino is passing the buck to anyone he can find, despite the fact that a ship’s captain is solely responsible for the ship’s safety. He says they were 300 metres off the coast of Giglio and hit unmarked rocks, so it’s the charts’ fault.

This is an admission that he intended the ship to deviate from his authorised course and pass to within 300 metres - dangerously close - of Giglio; it’s also an admission that he was happy with this despite not being on the bridge and, since there are actually well-marked rocks about 300 metres off Giglio, it may well be an admission that he stuck a GPS waypoint onto the rocks he then hit.

In any case, all skippers are told again and again that GPS accuracy should not be assumed to be perfect and charts often disagree with GPS positions by a few metres (and sometimes a lot more) if they were surveyed before GPS. And there aren’t many unmarked rocks large enough and shallow enough to sink a cruise ship in well-charted coastal waters near to ports well-used by ferries. His ship hit a rock because he went too close to an island he shouldn’t have been anywhere near. I think it’s his fault.

Third, he pretended nothing had happened. After the initial collision, the ship sailed on and it was only when the crew effectively mutinied and started preparations to abandon ship that he joined in. Still he denied that there was a serious problem. In conversations with the coastguard after the ship had come to rest on a reef and was listing 20 degrees to starboard in full view of everyone on Giglio, Schettino was still claiming that the only thing wrong was a small technical fault. He then, unbelievably, refused to take any further radio calls from the coastguard until they reached him by phone by which time a full-scale evacuation had been under way for 40 minutes.

By this time, with hundreds of people still on board, Schettino confirmed on the phone that he was on land which means, given the timings, that he must have taken one of the first lifeboats off the ship.

Then, having been told by outraged coastguard Gregorio de Falco that people had died (to which he asked ‘how many?’ though it was his job to be accounting for everyone onboard), he was told to “get back on board for fuck’s sake” and ordered several more times to climb a ladder on the bow and co-ordinate the rescue. Increasingly evasive, he refused, claiming it was too dark and other people were doing it anyway. He then got into a taxi for a 30 second ride to a local hotel stopping only to ask the taxi driver where he could get a new pair of socks.

The entire conversation with the coastguard is recorded and confirmed by passenger eye-witness accounts. Despite this, Schettino initially claimed on TV that he was last to leave the ship when all the passengers and crew were off. This was obviously untrue and came as news to his safety officer who was only rescued from the ship on Sunday.

Schettino now seems to admit that he let the ship a tad prematurely, but awesomely he now claims that he only did this because he fell into a lifeboat as the ship heeled. By an astounding coincidence he landed in it next to his second in command, Dimitri Christidis and Silvia Coronica, the third officer. So the the ship’s top three officers, all of whom should have been co-ordinating the rescue, all accidentally abandoned ship in the same lifeboat at the same time. If people hadn’t died, the old jokes about Italian tanks having one forward gear and three in reverse would be funny.

His crew don’t rate much better. The deputy mayor of Giglio who, unlike the captain, went on board to help with the rescue could find no evidence of ship’s officers or the captain and reported that the crew were a shambles. And in a touching show of loyalty that some might argue looks like ass-covering, senior officers are queuing up to denounce Schettino as a daredevil, a dictator and “a man who’d drive a bus like a Ferrari”. Some of them were apparently only following orders. Former boss Palumbo, the man for whom the detour was made, seems particularly ungrateful, saying: “I’ve always had my reservations about Schettino. It’s true, he was my second in command, but he was too exuberant. A daredevil. More than once I had to put him in his place.”

Schettino has now admitted that perhaps it was his fault and not the charts. It’s true that the salute was for Commodore Mario Palombo, with whom I was on the telephone. The route was decided as we left Civitavecchia but I made a mistake on the approach. I was navigating by sight because I knew the depths well and I had done this manoeuvre three or four times. But this time I ordered the turn too late and I ended up in water that was too shallow.” Bit late that, with upwards of 30 people dead.

For lovers of stereotypes, these events are powerful proof that people say things for a reason. That reason is of course that every now and then a figure comes along who perfectly encapsulates all our prejudices and strengthens them for the years and decades in which they are eroded by the basically decent behaviour of normal people. Francesco Schettino is just such a man. Unprofessional, incompetent, cowardly, mendacious and, above all, dressed like a popinjay, he lets us pass our knowledge to the next generation in the form of jokes that do not lie:

The Costa Concordia - designed by computers, built by robots …  driven by Italians.