GENOA, Italy (AFP) -- Italy's biggest-ever cruise ship set sail on its maiden voyage Tuesday with nearly 3,000 passengers aboard and a message for competitors across a diverse tourism industry: 1950s-style cruising is alive and thriving in the 21st century.

The 105,000-ton Costa Fortuna, a veritable floating town with 1,358 cabins, set off from the northern Italian port of Savona for a 10-day cruise to Spain, Morocco and the Balearic Islands.

For the city of Genoa, which jointly assumes the rotating mantle of Culture Capital of Europe with Lille of France next year, the Costa Fortuna is something of a lucky charm and a shot in the arm for the shipbuilding industry in nearby Sestri Ponente, where the liner was built.

Builder Fincantieri has turned the corner after it was almost forced to close in the 1980s, not having produced a transatlantic liner since the Michelangelo in 1962.

But the Costa Fortuna contributed to 2.2 billion euro in sales last year, and helped safeguard the jobs of some 2,400 people directly employed in Sestri Ponente as well as those of thousands of subcontracted workers. "For us and for Genoa, the delivery of the Costa Fortuna means we have come through a test," said Armando Firpo, a local official of the FIOM metalworkers union. "We've been waiting for this moment for 20 years."

Next year, parent company Costa Crociere will smash another bottle of champagne on the bows of the Fortuna's sistership, the Costa Magica -- to be launched next November -- and be able to toast a carrying capacity of 18,500 passengers across its fleet of 11 ships.

Having invested around one billion euros in the two ships, Costa Crociere president Pier Luigi Foschi is bullish about the cruise industry's future, pointing to a European market which remains largely untapped.

Eight million people annually take cruises in the United States, while in Europe, with a similar population, the figure is only one quarter of that, he said.

"We have resisted better than others the crises of this difficult year," Foschi said, pointing to figures of 557,000 passengers in the past 12 months, up from 462,000 the year before, and a cabin occupancy rate of 102 percent.

Cruising tourism appears to have turned the corner from the dark aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in the US. In Italy, the spinoff is being felt in much-visited seaports like Naples and Bari. In Savona, Costa Crociere has built a new passenger terminal, having run out of expansion space in Genoa.

All of Costa Crociere's ships fly the Italian flag. Though the family-owned Italian company was bought by the U.S. cruise giant Carnival in 1997, it has managed to keep its European identity.

Interior design was inspired by the transatlantic voyages of its illustrious predecessors like the Roma, the Rex and the Michelangelo, which carried Italian emigrants to the US across several decades of the last century.

"It's an homage to the golden age of the transatlantic liner," spokesman Ralph Steffen told AFP during a tour of the ship.

With competition thick on the ground, and on the high seas -- names such as Cunard Line, Holland America Line, Princess Cruises, Swan Hellenic are all vying for business in a lively market -- the Costa Fortuna will be positioned in Europe throughout next summer and move to the U.S. next autumn for the lucrative Caribbean itineraries.

"From a technical viewpoint, Costa Fortuna is an ultramodern ship," said its captain, Mario Palombo.

"Thanks to the equipment, the instrumentation as well as the propulsive and maneuvering power, the ship is very easy to handle.

Despite the name "Fortuna", a reference to the Roman goddess of luck, a cruise on the opulently fitted-out ship need not cost a fortune. Prices start from 1,315 euros (1,550 dollars) per person, and run up to 2,745 euros.

Luxury add-ons include spa treatment and hot stone therapy -- massage using heated stones from Bali -- at 160 euros for 80 minutes.