A €500,000 Win Sparks a Legal and Personal Dispute
It was meant to be a romantic gesture. On March 8th, International Women’s Day, a man from Carsoli, in the Abruzzo region east of Rome, walked into the Bar Renato at the local shopping centre and bought a five-euro scratch card. His gift to his girlfriend in lieu of the traditional sprig of mimosa.
She scratched it. She won.
The prize came to €500,000. The woman deposited the ticket at a bank, did not return home, and stopped answering her phone. She appears to have decided, unilaterally, that the windfall was hers alone.
The man, unwilling to accept that outcome, says he will go to the Carabinieri to assert his claim over the winning ticket. His case rests on a simple enough argument: he bought it, he gave it to her as a gift, and there are witnesses. The barman at the shop where the ticket was purchased confirms that the boyfriend bought it and handed it straight to his partner, with words to the effect of: “Today is Women’s Day, instead of mimosa, I’m giving you this scratch card.”
The woman, for her part, was apparently so stunned by the result that she asked the barman to verify the ticket himself. He confirmed it: the win was as large as it appeared. Then she walked out of the story.
The lucky numbers were 13, 47, 29 and 50, though lucky for whom, as the report drily notes, remains to be determined.
The legal question sitting beneath this domestic drama is genuinely murky. When you give someone a gift, ownership transfers. But does that principle hold when the “gift” was a speculative token that became enormously valuable only after it changed hands? Italian courts have wrestled with scratch card disputes before — a case in Sulmona saw two former friends litigate over a shared winning ticket, and in Verona a man was acquitted after refusing to split a two-million-euro prize with friends who claimed a stake. The law does not speak with one voice on these matters.
What the Carsoli case adds to this small genre of Italian lottery jurisprudence is a certain poignancy. The couple had been together for some time and had recently moved in together. The mimosa, yellow flowers traditionally given to women in Italy on March 8th, a symbol of resilience and solidarity, was replaced by a scratch card. That scratch card is now the subject of a police complaint, and the relationship, one assumes, is over.
Half a million euros is, by any measure, life-changing money. The question is whose life it has changed, and how.
