Twenty months after it capsized off the Tuscan island of Giglio, killing 32 people, the Costa Concordia cruise ship has risen from the Mediterranean after a successful €600m salvage operation.

Fifty six giant pulleys hauled the vessel back to an upright position in a 19 hour operation, exposing a section of the white ship’s exterior that was stained by rust and algae after months under water.

By 4am on Tuesday morning, the 950-foot-long, 114,000-ton vessel had been pulled through 65 degrees to stand on a bed of over 1,000 concrete sacks and six huge underwater platforms.

"The rotation has finished its course, we are at zero degrees, the ship is resting on the platforms," said Italy's civil protection chief Franco Gabrielli at a late night press conference on Giglio where he was applauded and cheered by residents.

"It could not have gone better than this," said Franco Porcellacchia, an engineer working on the salvage for ship owner Costa Cruises. "It was a perfect operation."

The Costa Concordia grounded near the port of Giglio in January 2012 after its captain, Francesco Schettino smashed it into coastal rock during a so-called ‘sail past’.

The Costa Concordia's side was severely damanged during the crash

He is now standing trial on charges of manslaughter and abandoning his ship.

Some 4,200 passengers and crew scrambled into lifeboats or plunged into shallow water after the ship ran aground and came to rest impaled on its side on two underwater outcrops of granite.

As it rose out of the water in the early hours of Tuesday, two large indentations could be seen on the side of the ship where it had been pinioned on the rocks.

After the operation started on Monday morning, 6,000 tons of pressure were required to pull the ship free from the rock, which had penetrated 18 feet into the hull.

Needing to rotate through 65 degrees, the ship then slowly turned through the afternoon until 11 massive metal boxes welded to the exposed side of the ship, some the height of 11-story buildings, splashed into the water.

By midnight, salvage workers were able to switch off the pulleys and open valves in the boxes to allow water in at 1,000 cubic feet a minute, adding the necessary ballast to bring the ship down onto the platforms.

The ariel view of the ship in the Mediterranean sea last April

When the ship is deemed stable, metal boxes will also be added to the formerly submerged side of the ship. Then, water will be pumped out of the boxes, floating the vessel so it can be  towed next spring to a port, probably on the Italian mainland, for breaking up.

"We have already looked at the side of the ship to see where the boxes will go and we will quantify the work to do," said Porcellacchia. "The starboard side looks pretty bad, as we expected," he added.

The Costa Concordia docked in November 2006. The ship was built in 2004

Fears that a polluted slick of paint, residual fuel, small quantities of heavy metal and rotting food would emerge from the ship, proved unfounded, officials said on Tuesday.

"Now we will see what support and adjustments the ship needs," said Sergio Girotto, the project manager for Italian salvage firm Micoperi, which has managed the salvage with US firm Titan Salvage.