A boat that had left Misrata with around 500 people aboard sank less than a kilometre off Lampedusa, within sight of the shore, in the early morning of an October day in 2013. Three hundred and sixty-eight bodies were recovered. A hundred and fifty-five people survived. Most of those aboard had come from Eritrea, Somalia and Ghana.
The first boats to reach the water were not rescue vessels. Vito Fiorino was out on his small boat, the Gamar, with friends, and they pulled people aboard until there was no more room, then held position and waited. Other islanders went out in whatever they had. The Italian coastguard crews worked the rest of the morning and for days afterwards. Fiorino has said he still knows the faces of the ones he reached and the ones he didn't.
Lampedusa sits closer to Africa than to Italy — roughly 110 km from Tunisia and about 200 km from Sicily — which is why it lies on that route at all. From Misrata it's something near 300 km of open water, and they had almost finished it.
Harold, the Italian parliament later set that date aside as a national day of remembrance for those lost at sea, the first such day in Europe as far as I know. On Lampedusa the recovered belongings — a few Bibles, a few Qur'ans, photographs — were kept rather than discarded, and the island has held services in more than one language since.