Italian police arrested four street cleaners for pocketing hundreds of euros dropped into Rome's famous Fountain of Trevi.

Following tradition, thousands of tourists stand with their backs to the Renaissance masterpiece and throw coins over their shoulders into the water.

A cleaning firm regularly sweeps out the money, which adds up to at least several hundreds euros a day. Half of the proceeds are given to the Roman Catholic charity Caritas.

Lately, Caritas workers noticed a sharp decline in money and alerted the police, who caught the cleaners Monday with some 1,200 euros, reports Reuters

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

The four were not the first to try and clean-up at the Trevi Fountain. In 2002 police arrested a homeless man who made up to 12,000 euros a month on the tourist attraction.