Cleaners polish off Italy's Trevi Fountain

ROME - Italian police arrested four street cleaners as they tried to pocket hundreds of euros scooped from Rome's famed Fountain of Trevi.

Each day, thousands of tourists stand with their backs to the Renaissance masterpiece and throw coins over their shoulders into its shallow basin in a tradition which is supposed to ensure they return to Rome.

The money, which adds up to several hundred euros a day or more, is regularly swept out by a cleaning firm with half of the proceeds handed over to Roman Catholic charity Caritas.

However, Caritas workers had noted a sharp decline in recent takings and alerted the police, who caught the quartet of cleaners on Monday trying to walk off with some €1200 ($2082).

A police official estimated they might have stolen as much as €110,000 in recent weeks before being stopped.

The quartet were not the first to try to cash in on the Trevi Fountain. In 2002 police arrested a homeless man, dubbed d'Artagnan, who made up to €12,000 a month with his pre-dawn raids on the tourist attraction.

- REUTERS