A lottery participant who mistakenly discarded a €1m (£857,158) winning ticket may rank as the luckiest individual in Italy after sanitation workers recovered the missing slip.

The unnamed player tossed the ticket at a shop in Bitonto, southern Italy, after checking his numbers and receiving a non-payable notice.

The man understood he had thrown away a winner only when a relative mentioned that the numbers he played for years had been drawn.

This prompted a two-day search through a large pile of waste collected by a refuse truck, according to Roberto Nicola Toscano, head of the waste firm, in comments to Italian news agency Ansa.

This story counts as nothing short of miraculous, he added.

Describing the event, he explained that the non-payable message appears when the prize exceeds the amount the shop can pay out.

After returning home, his family pointed out his usual numbers - 2, 4, 8, 10, and 51 - had been selected.

It was then that he grasped the error. So the group returned to the shop and learned the tickets had been discarded and collected by one of our operators, said Toscano, director of SANB which handles waste collection in the area.

After the player contacted the refuse company, the bin lorry was located before its contents were compacted for disposal.

Luckily it was a Sunday, otherwise the load would have already gone to landfill, the boss told Italian broadcaster TGCOM24.

The truck was then taken to a special site where the search began for the small piece of paper hidden in a mountain of waste.

After a two-day search, the winning ticket was found by a waste worker on Tuesday morning.

It was in a torn bag along with other damaged tickets: this was one of the few intact ones, Toscano told Ansa.

The cost of the recovery operation will be charged to the winner, who had signed a declaration promising to cover the associated costs.

The luck extended when Toscano and his colleagues bought a scratch card as a joke. They won €50 (£43).