ITALY: Italian police arrested four street-cleaners as they tried to escape yesterday with a stash of coins they had scooped from Rome's famed Fountain of Trevi.
Each day, thousands of tourists throw coins over their shoulders into the fountain in a tradition which is supposed to ensure that they return to Rome. The money is regularly collected by a cleaning firm, with half of the proceeds being handed over to the Catholic charity Caritas.
However, Caritas noted a sharp decline in recent takings and alerted the police, who arrested the four cleaners yesterday as they were walking away with about €1,200.
A police official estimated that they might have stolen as much as €110,000 before being caught.
The four were not the first to try to cash in on the Trevi Fountain. In 2002, police arrested a homeless man, dubbed d'Artagnan, who enriched himself by up to €12,000 a month in pre-dawn raids on the tourist attraction.
