A race to find out who won Europe’s biggest lottery prize to date got under way in Italy on Thursday after a €1 ticket bought in a small town bar outside Milan won the €66-million jackpot.
The win put the small town of Veduggio con Colzano on the map and its 4 500 souls into the spotlight. The identity of the winner remained unknown by midday Thursday, more than 16 hours after the lotto draw.
Residents poured into the streets within minutes of the draw late Wednesday to toast the unknown winner at the Corona Bar, which sold the winning ticket.
Bar owner Lorenzo Ierano declined to venture a guess as to who it might be. ”There was an incredible last-minute rush for tickets yesterday and we sold 1 500 altogether, but it could just as likely be a syndicate as an individual person.
”Lots of people have come in buying up tickets as part of a syndicate,” he said.
Ierano will get nothing for selling the winning ticket, but his lucky bar is likely to have longer queues for the lotto in future.
”I won’t receive anything but the joy of the customers,” he said.
Journalists flocked to the town on Thursday, ensuring that the treasure hunt that has enthralled Italy as the rollover jackpot skyrocketed throughout the last 44 draws will now turn to a kind of witch-hunt for the lucky winner.
Suspicious eyes will be cast around this small town in the coming days for signs of newly acquired super-wealth, or people suddenly quitting their jobs.
Locals in the town, about 30km outside the northern city of Milan, said it may well have been a factory worker at one of the town’s two dominant nuts and bolt manufacturers, many of whom are immigrants from Africa or Albania.
Albanian immigrant Demir Sopaj, a 32-year-old construction worker, felt he had come close: ”I bought three lines for €1 each, and when I saw the TV I got a shock.”
The ticket may also have been bought by someone from one of the neighbouring small towns.
Veduggio’s parish priest, Father Naborre Nava, had words of caution for the winner: ”Let’s hope that the winner, with this money, does good. And keeps calm …”
Even the jackpot of €66-million doesn’t quite excite Italians as much as its equivalent in old lire.
The euro’s ability to diminish previously large sums is so abhorred here — €1 is rougly equal to 2 000 old lire — that all references to the lotto jackpot are also given in lire, to emphasise its true magnitude for Italians: 127-billion lire.
The sheer size of the jackpot has caused several politicians to call for legislation to limit the payout to annual increments, concerned that sudden wealth could overwhelm the lives of ordinary people.
The Italian win, Europe’s biggest to date, still falls a long way short of the world record $315-million dollars won on the Powerball lottery in West Virginia, United States, on December 25 last year.
The jackpot win will shoot the winner up the social ladder, if he or she so chooses. Even Italy’s richest man, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, has a declared annual income of about €7-million, small change if the jackpot was won by an
individual. — Sapa-AFP