An Italian Family Threw Away A €1 Million Lottery Ticket By Accident. Then A Miracle Happened.

In Bitonto, a small city near Bari in southern Italy's Puglia region, a lottery player scratched an instant ticket and spotted two words they did not want to see: "non pagabile" or not payable. Assuming the ticket was worthless, they threw it in the household rubbish. It was only after returning home that family members realized "non pagabile" simply meant the prize was too large for the local shop to hand out directly and had to be processed elsewhere. The ticket was a winner. It was worth €1 million. And it was now somewhere inside a garbage truck.

The race that followed was extraordinary. Roberto Nicola Toscano, managing director of Sanb, the waste management company serving the area, mobilized his entire team. His staff traced the ticket's journey from the collection point to the specific truck that had loaded it. The truck could not be emptied at Sanb's own depot for hygiene and safety reasons, so the company called in a specialist sorting firm elsewhere in the Bari area and an overnight search began in earnest. Workers sifted through refuse for hours. Then, just before dawn, one of them reached into a torn bag and found it. The ticket had survived almost completely intact. "It was one of the few still intact," Toscano said. The story had one final perfect twist: several of the Sanb workers who had spent the night searching decided to buy a scratchcard of their own over a celebratory morning coffee. They won €50. "This story has something miraculous about it," Toscano told ANSA. He was right.

Source:https://www.wantedinrome.com/news/italian-familys-1-million-lottery-ticket-rescued-from-trash.html