Three Italian Strangers Flew To Ireland To Return A Man's Lost Ring

Peter Mohr, an Irishman from County Clare, was on holiday in Italy when he lost his wedding ring on a beach. Three Italian friends found it, saw an inscription inside, and began what turned into a weeks-long investigation to find the owner. The three friends, whom Mohr has since taken to calling his hobbits, traced the inscription to a business, used that to find Mohr's name, tracked him down online, and made contact. When they finally reached him and told him what they had found, Mohr said it was such an improbable story that he did not know what to feel. The three friends had already decided, however, that mailing the ring back to Ireland was not the right ending for the story they had found themselves inside. They proposed something else: they would fly to Ireland and return it in person, in the spirit of the quest-like fashion in which they had undertaken the search in the first place. They booked the flights. They came to County Clare. They handed Peter Mohr his wedding ring in person, and the four of them have been in each other's lives ever since.

Mohr told CBC Radio's As It Happens that before the ring was found and returned, none of them had ever met. He and the three Italian strangers who flew to Ireland for him were complete unknowns to each other, connected by nothing except a piece of gold left on a beach. Now, he said, we have a family in Ireland. Andrea Palagi, one of the three Italians, said the whole thing had begun as a simple act of trying to do the right thing, but that returning the ring had turned into something none of them expected: a friendship that none of the four would have had otherwise, crossing two countries and two languages, built on a beach, a ring, and the decision to see the search through to the end rather than dropping it in a lost-and-found box and walking away. Mohr said the experience has given him a new belief in human kindness, a phrase that is easy to dismiss in the abstract and considerably harder to dismiss when three strangers have just flown from Italy to your county to prove it to you. The ring is back on his finger. The hobbits are back in Italy. And there is now a family in Ireland that did not exist before.

Source:https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/kindness-friendship-story-italy-ireland-9.7383392