Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Domnica Cemortan testified at Francesco Schettino's trial, as Alan Johnston reports 
 
 A Moldovan dancer who was on the bridge of the Costa Concordia with Captain Francesco Schettino has admitted she was his lover at his trial. 
 
 Domnica Cemortan testified that she was in a romantic relationship with the captain and was with him when the cruise ship ran aground off the north-west Italian coast. 
 
 Capt Schettino faces multiple charges of manslaughter and abandoning ship. 
 
 The January 2012 tragedy killed 32 people. 
 
 The captain faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted. 
 
 Ms Cemortan has been the subject of intense media interest, says the BBC's Alan Johnston in Rome. On the night the Costa Concordia ran aground, she had dinner with the captain before he invited her to join him on the bridge as he oversaw what was meant to be a close sail-past of the little Tuscan island of Giglio. 
 
 Local press have speculated the captain may have been distracted by her presence, or even showing off. 
 
 In court, Ms Cemortan acknowledged after being pressed that they had been romantically involved. She had boarded the ship as a non-paying passenger hours before the crash, she said, adding: "When you are someone's lover, no-one asks you for a ticket." She subsequently dismissed the remark as a joke to her translator. 
 
 She said she had worked for the company that operated the Costa Concordia for about three weeks in December 2011, and had met Capt Schettino on a previous cruise. 
 
 Image caption Capt Francesco Schettino blamed his Indonesian helmsman for steering the ship onto rocks 
 
 After the ship hit the rocks, Ms Cemortan said the captain urged her to "save herself". 
 
 She told court that she helped other passengers to abandon ship before getting into a lifeboat herself. 
 
 Trial to take weeks 
 
 The court is expected to hear evidence from about 1,000 surviving passengers and crew during Capt Schettino's trial. 
 
 In testimony earlier in the day, ship maitre d' Antonello Tievoli told the court in Grossetto, Tuscany, that he had asked the captain if he could sail close to the island of Giglio because he has family there, the news agency AP reported. 
 
 The captain obliged on 6 January, but was apparently disappointed with the result, and ordered the ship's helmsman to plot a closer route for next time. 
 
 A week later, the ship ran aground on rocks after veering too close to the island, with 3,206 passengers and 1,023 crew aboard. 
 
 The captain has acknowledged fault in the tragedy, but his defence team is arguing the ship sank in part because watertight doors did not function on the ship. 
 
 He also told the court in late September that his Indonesian helmsman was to blame for steering the ship onto rocks and ignoring orders to slow down. 
 
 Image caption The route of the Costa Concordia 
 
 However, an Italian naval expert told the trial these were not crucial factors and the crash would have happened anyway. 
 
 The helmsman, Jacob Rusli Bin, is one of five employees who were granted plea bargains in return for mild sentences in a separate proceeding. He was given a sentence of one year and eight months. 
 
 The 290m-long vessel was righted last month in one of the largest, most complex salvage operations ever that took 18 hours and followed months of stabilisation and preparation work by a team of 500 engineers and divers. 
 
 That operation allowed divers to retrieve the remains of one of the two people still missing in the disaster, believed to be an Italian passenger, Maria Grazia Trecarichi. An Indian waiter, Russel Rebello, is still unaccounted for. 
 
 Plans are now being made to attempt to remove the wreckage of the ship next year. 
 
 Image caption The Costa Concordia was righted in September 
 
 Correction 30 October 2013: We initially reported that the remains of Russel Rebello, not Maria Grazia Trecharichi, had been found, based on out-of-date information. ||||| The captain who steered his 114,000-tonne vessel into rocks off the Italian coast last Friday was drinking wine at dinner with a "beautiful" woman minutes earlier, a witness has claimed. 
 
 Francesco Schettino, who is under house arrest accused of manslaughter and abandoning ship after he grounded the Costa Concordia on the island of Giglio following the collision, has told investigators that he had not drunk alcohol that night. But a passenger, Angelo Fabbri, has revealed that he and his wife watched Schettino –who is married with a child – enjoy a gourmet meal with red wine at the ship's most exclusive restaurant. 
 
 "Schettino, in a dark uniform, was sat in front of a young woman," Fabbri told newspaper Il Secolo XIX. "She appeared young, initially we thought she could even be his daughter. A beautiful woman, slim, shoulder-length blonde hair, a black dress with bare arms. They were laughing, they were informal, it was very merry," he said. "The wine?" he added. "There is no doubt they drank, at least a whole decanter, the last drops were poured into the commander's glass." 
 
 Fabbri described Schettino as a "show-off", and said he, the woman and another officer left the restaurant around 9.05pm. At about 9.45pm, he was back on the bridge, where he steered the ship into rocks while attempting to "salute" a former captain on Giglio. Italian media reported on Thursday that investigators are trying to interview Domnica Cermontan, 25, a Moldovan employee of Costa Crociere, the cruise ship's owner. 
 
 A spokesman for the company said it was ready to provide authorities with information about "the woman who on the evening of the incident appears to have dined with Captain Schettino". 
 
 In an interview with Romanian newspaper Adevarul, Cermontan said she left the bridge at 11.50pm, at which time Schettino was still there. 
 
 Cermontan also told a Romanian TV station she believed Schettino saved the lives of passengers by grounding the vessel. "He has done something extraordinary," she said. Prosecutors believe that Schettino delayed telling the coast guard the ship was holed and then left the vessel while 300 passengers were still on board. 
 
 The bodies of 11 passengers and crew have been found by rescuers and 21 passengers remain unaccounted for. 
 
 According to audio tapes released on Thursday a crew member on board the ship told coast guard officials 30 minutes after the collision that the Costa Concordia had suffered a mere black out and that there was no emergency on board.
– What's this? Someone on the doomed Costa Concordia is actually praising the actions of Capt. Francesco Schettino: "Look at how many people are alive because of him. It’s a tragedy that people are missing, but he saved over 3,000 people on that ship because of his actions." So says 25-year-old Domnica Cemortan, reports the Telegraph. Schettino, however, may not be happy Cemortan has emerged in the spotlight. Details are still sketchy, but she may have been the young woman that passengers saw the captain dining with before the ship ran aground. Sample headline from the Guardian: "Italian captain linked to mystery woman." The Daily Mail, meanwhile, refers to her as a "glamorous blonde." The young Moldovan woman had worked as a hostess on the ship but apparently wasn't on duty this voyage, reports AP. Still, she said she went to the bridge with Schettino and other officers to help translate evacuation instructions to passengers, adding that Schettino was still on the deck when she evacuated about two hours later. Italian media say prosecutors plan to interview her.