An anonymous lottery winner burst into tears after bin men spent two days searching through heaps of rubbish to rescue her discarded £857,000 ticket.
The unnamed woman from Bitonto threw her ticket in the rubbish after a local store declared it "non-payable".
She wrongly believed the message meant her ticket was completely worthless.
But returning home, she realised her regular picks of 2, 4, 8, 10 and 51 had actually secured a jackpot too large for the shop to hand over.
She raced back to the store, only to discover the bins had already been emptied.
And that is when the local waste collection company launched a massive recovery effort.
SANB administrator Roberto Nicola Toscano said they managed to reconstruct the ticket's exact journey.
They quickly identified and intercepted the correct rubbish truck before the waste was processed.
Yet the recovery risked exposing people to potentially dangerous material, meaning a specialist company had to be brought in to carry out the search.
It took two full days of sifting through the refuse before the intact ticket was finally found.
Mr Toscano rang the winner to break the news, prompting her to cry with emotion over the phone.
"I would have hugged her, but we were on the phone," he said.
Before returning the £857,000 slip, Mr Toscano touched it in the hope that some good luck would rub off on him.
Shortly afterward, he won the equivalent of £42 on a scratch card.