The chances of finding something you’ve lost while travelling are pretty slim. But that wasn’t the case for one New Jersey couple who found an engagement ring that had gone missing nine years earlier while they were vacationing in Italy. It was nestled in the crack of a sidewalk.
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Justin and Margaret Mussel went to Italy nine years ago to visit Margaret’s family in San Marco dei Cavoti in the Campania region of the country. After a day trip to Pompeii, Justin says the couple decided to take a nap. Upon waking, Margaret realized her engagement ring had slipped off her finger.
“We were tearing the house apart because we weren’t sure where she had lost it,” Justin tells Global News. “My wife was devastated also because we didn’t know if we’d ever go back to Italy.”
On top of all that, San Marco dei Cavoti sits on a hill and when it rains, everything on the ground rushes down toward the sewers.
“It rained for a couple of days after she lost her ring, so we figured it had washed down some drain,” he recalls.
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A few years later, Justin bought his wife a new, similar-looking engagement ring. Little did he know that it wouldn’t be necessary.
At the behest of Margaret’s father, the Mussels, along with their two sons, returned to the family home in Italy earlier this month. Originally, Margaret’s father was going to go alone with his grandsons to show them the town where he grew up, but Justin and Margaret decided to tag along.
It turned out, they would do more than just rediscover their roots.
One evening, as they were sitting in front of the family home, talking and watching the cars go by, something caught Justin’s eye.
“It was around 11 p.m. and we had just come back from the piazza. Our neighbour was over and offered me a seat, so she dragged a bench in front of the door,” he says. “It just happened to line up with a crack in the sidewalk.”
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Justin says this particular crack kept flickering every time a car drove by, and he had to see what was causing it.
“I went inside and grabbed a screwdriver because I was curious. I dug something out, and lo and behold, it was the ring.”
Initially, Margaret thought he was playing a trick on her — the story of her lost engagement ring had become something of a running joke in the family. But when she ran upstairs to see that her other ring was still on the nightstand, she was floored.
Justin says she now wears her original ring and that they’ll save the second one for one of their sons when it comes time for them to get married.
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