Italian Lottery winner 'miraculously' finds £1million winning ticket after two day search through mountains of rubbish
The woman threw the ticket away in a shop in southern Italy after being told the slip was 'non-payable' before realising that was because the prize fund was too large to be paid out by the shop
A woman in Italy who accidentally chucked out a €1 million ticket has struck lucky once again after refuse workers found the missing prize.
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Local workers sifted through heaps of rubbish for two days before they found the lucky ticket.
The player, who remains anonymous, threw the ticket away in a shop in Bintonto, southern Italy, after being told the slip was “non-payable”.
The error message indicated that the prize was too large for the shop to pay it out.
To her horror, she was later informed by family that her numbers – two, four, eight, 10 and 51- had all shown up, and she began her frantic search to locate her ticket.
She dashed back to the shop but was told that the ticket had been thrown away with the day’s rubbish.
The woman reached out to SANB, the local waste collection firm, which agreed to assist her search.
Roberto Nicola Toscano, the company's director, described the mission as "nothing short of miraculous".
He says that the only reason the search was fruitful was that the winning ticket had been discarded on a Sunday, “otherwise it would have already ended up in landfill”.
The ticket was tracked all the way from the shop to a processing facility, but when it arrived another stumbling block arose.
Mr Toscano revealed the vehicle “couldn't be emptied at our facility due to the risk of waste contamination," and had to pull in support from a nearby firm in Bari to search through the waste.
"We contacted a company in the Bari area that could enable us to sort through the load, and we started searching in the morning,” he explained.
After two gruelling days, a worker finally located the ticket amid what Mr Toscano called "a mountain of rubbish".
"It was in a bag along with other damaged tickets: this was one of the few intact ones."
Before returning the ticket, Mr Toscano touched it in hopes of absorbing some of its powers.
He went on to buy a scratchcard with other colleagues and, luckily enough, “took home €50”.
The winner subsequently signed a declaration agreeing to pay the search operation’s costs.
In a social media post, Mr Toscano later wrote: "This was a truly unique story about an incredibly lucky person who hit the bullseye but was then very unlucky because the ticket ended up in the rubbish, thrown away by accident, and who in the end was incredibly lucky all over again."