Garbage workers help Bitonto woman find binned €1m lottery ticket

A woman in Bitonto, a town in Puglia, mistakenly threw a €1 million winning lottery ticket into the trash, prompting her local sanitation company to launch an hours-long search, according to Deutsche Welle. The player only realised what had happened after family members told her the numbers she had played for years had been drawn, the BBC separately reported.

The sanitation workers' painstaking effort to recover the ticket from the rubbish has captured attention across Europe, with both Deutsche Welle and the BBC covering the story. The woman's decades-long habit of playing the same numbers meant that when the winning combination came up, the ticket was already buried in waste.

The incident has resonated in Puglia, where the story's setting in Bitonto, a town known for its olive groves and historic centre, has given it a distinctly local character. The recovery of the ticket after the garbage workers' search has been described as a stroke of luck that borders on the miraculous.