An anonymous lottery player in Bitonto, a town in southern Italy’s Puglia region near Bari, recovered a €1 million MillionDay ticket after mistakenly discarding it and triggering a two-day search through six tonnes of rubbish by local waste workers.
The player had selected the same numbers for years—2, 4, 8, 10 and 51—tied to the memory of a loved one. On Friday evening, 31 July 2026, those numbers came up in the 20:30 MillionDay draw. The ticket was checked the following Sunday at a local tobacconist shop. The self-service terminal displayed the message “non pagabile,” or non-payable. The player took that as a loss, left the ticket behind and went home.
Under the rules of the game, retailers can pay only smaller prizes over the counter. Larger wins require a separate claims process, so the terminal flags high-value tickets that way. Back home, a relative recognized the numbers as the winning combination. The family rushed back to the shop only to learn the refuse had already been collected.
They contacted SANB, the public waste company that serves Bitonto, Terlizzi, Corato and Ruvo di Puglia. Roberto Nicola Toscano, the sole administrator of SANB and a local labour lawyer, told the Italian news agency ANSA the recovery felt “nothing short of miraculous.” Staff quickly traced the correct collection truck, stopped it before the load reached a landfill or compactor, and diverted the contents to a specialised sorting facility under guard.
Ten operators worked through the six tonnes of mixed household waste. They found multiple damaged tickets and stubs. Early Tuesday morning, around 5:30 a.m., one worker spotted the intact winning slip inside a hole-ridden bag mixed with other ruined tickets. The team cheered as if they had won the prize themselves. Toscano said he touched the ticket hoping some of the luck might rub off. Later that day the crew bought a scratch card for fun and won €50.
When Toscano telephoned the winner with the news, the player cried with relief. The winner had already signed a declaration agreeing to cover the cost of the recovery operation. Toscano later posted about the episode on Facebook under the heading “fortuna non olet,” a play on the old Latin phrase that money does not stink.
The ticket survived because the collection happened on a Sunday. Had it been a weekday, the load would have gone straight to landfill. SANB confirmed the ticket was one of the few still readable. The player remains unidentified as the formal claim process for a jackpot of that size runs through Italy’s Customs and Monopolies Agency (ADM).
Toscano, appointed sole administrator of SANB in December 2019 and reconfirmed in 2023, has described the entire sequence as a rare double stroke of fortune: first the win, then the recovery of the physical ticket needed to collect it. The company operates as an in-house provider for the northern Bari area municipalities and handles urban hygiene services under regional regulations.
For verification of the draw and prize rules, official MillionDay results list the 31 July 2026 evening combination as 2-4-8-10-51. Larger claims must be processed through designated banks or the lottery operator’s prize office after verification by Italy’s Customs and Monopolies Agency.
