Photo is unrelated to this article. [Getty Images Bank]
Photo is unrelated to this article. [Getty Images Bank]

A winning lottery ticket worth 1 million euros ($1.15 million) was recovered from a pile of garbage in Italy after more than a day of searching.

The head of a waste management company in the southern Italian region of Puglia said the ticket — found after workers sifted through trash loaded onto a collection vehicle — was "miraculously intact," according to AFP and Italy's ANSA news agency on Tuesday.

According to Italian outlet Davitonto, the ticket was a winning "MillionDay" draw held at 8:30 p.m. on Friday. The winner had long used numbers connected to someone dear to them.

The trouble began Sunday, when the winner checked the ticket at a local shop and the machine displayed a "payment not possible" message. Not knowing that small retailers can only pay out minor prizes, the winner assumed the ticket had lost and left it behind.

It was only after returning home that the winner realized the family's longtime numbers had in fact won, and rushed back to the shop — but the ticket had already been thrown away and collected. The winner contacted the waste management company, pledging to cover all costs if the ticket could be found.

"The collection truck had already taken it away, so we retraced the ticket's journey without much hope," the company head said.

The company tracked down the specific collection vehicle and transferred its contents to a specialist facility. Workers spent more than a day sorting through the garbage before finding the ticket intact.

According to Davitonto, the company head described the episode on social media as "a truly extraordinary story" — the tale of someone who "was the luckiest person alive for winning 1 million euros, then the unluckiest for throwing the ticket away, and then the luckiest again for getting it back."


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