Il Nuovo Postiglione - Italian garbagemen help recover lost 1 mln euro lottery ticket

The instant win ticket was "miraculously still in one piece" after garbage workers combed through mounds of trash on their truck, said Roberto Nicola Toscano, the administrator of the SANB company in Italy's southern Puglia region.

Toscano explained how when the winner went on Sunday to check her ticket at her local shop after the drawing, the machine indicated it was "non-payable". That was because smaller retailers can only redeem small wins.

But the woman -- who remains anonymous -- didn't realize she had won the big jackpot.

"The winner always played the same numbers, as they were associated with a loved one," Toscano said.

When she returned home from the store, a family member told her that her regular numbers had won. They immediately ran back to the shop, only to discover that the ticket had already been thrown away and the trash collected.

She called Toscano.

"We reconstructed the journey of the ticket, without much hope of finding it, as it had already been picked up by a garbage truck," Toscano told AFP.

With a stroke of luck, however, they managed to identify the right truck and stopped it.

Given the risk posed by potentially dangerous material in the waste, they took the vehicle to a specialist company equipped to do the search, he said.

The workers searched for over a day, finding various tickets and ticket stubs.

"Amongst them was the stub we were looking for, which was miraculously still in one piece," Toscano told AFP Tuesday.

When he told the winner they had found it, "she cried with emotion", he said.

"I would have hugged her, but we were on the phone."

The averted disaster did not come for free. SANB, located in Bitonto outside Bari, is a public agency, meaning that the cost of the search would have been borne by taxpayers.

Toscano said he had the woman sign a promise to "cover all of the additional costs" incurred -- a gamble that certainly paid off.

G.Palmiero--INP