Call him “Robby.” That’s what those close to Roberto Mantovani, 55, call him in Bologna. But for a year now, the man who has been driving his Volkswagen Touran through the streets of the capital of Emilia-Romagna, in northern Tuscany, has not only friends. Especially within his profession. After having been a firefighter and then having worked in the municipal dog pound, Roberto Mantovani, this “M” It was announced in May 2023 that he took the plunge and bought a taxi license in 2016. “The most beautiful job in the world in the most beautiful city in the world”, He says in Tassista di notte, aventure di una vida contromano (“Night Taxi, Adventures of a Life Against the Current”, Garzanti, 2024, untranslated), a book published earlier this summer.
Robby shares his sometimes unusual nighttime encounters, his passion for the Boston Red Sox baseball team, and declares his love for his city. “Roberto told me about Bologna like no one else. When I have a question about a street or a neighborhood, he is the one I call.”, “, confesses his writer friend Carlo Lucarelli, who made the taxi driver one of the characters in his latest thriller.
Although he is invited to all the bookstores on the Peninsula, the release of the book has reinforced his image as a “The most famous taxi in Italy”. And rightly so, it is an indictment of one of Italy’s incurable evils: tax evasion. Everything changed on social media when, in May 2023, Roberto Mantovani decided to publish on his X account (still Twitter at the time) the details of his gross monthly income. According to official tax figures, an Italian driver earns an average of 1,300 euros gross per month. However, the revealed income of the Bolognese “taxi driver” sometimes approaches 10,000 euros gross per month. Robby cannot stand his colleagues’ complaints against the thieving State, while many blackmail him.
The law of silence
“You are going to kill our profession,” says a colleague who, like him, works at Cotabo, the Bolognese taxi cooperative. “If you want to talk about taxis, the only rule is to say good things about them. We are a family, united and untouchable,” He reports in his book. A law of silence that one might think was imported from Calabria, the birthplace of the ‘Ndrangheta mafia organisation. The one who Roberto makes speak is a colleague, whom he called “Benito”, the embodiment of a profession corrupted according to him by corporatism.
In the summer of 2022, Mario Draghi’s government will require taxi drivers to have a bank card payment terminal, which will provoke the anger of the profession. In several cities, many of them went on strike. Robby talks about WhatsApp loops where people boast about having made a “clean day”, That is, he managed to receive payment only in cash. The driver had not taken into account the shock wave he would cause.
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