Call him “Robby.” That’s what the friends of Roberto Mantovani, 55, call him in Bologna. But for the past year, the man who drives his Volkswagen Touran through the streets of the capital of Emilia-Romagna, north of Tuscany, has not only had friends. Especially in his profession. After being a firefighter and then working at the municipal pound, Roberto Mantovani, whom “M” had met in May 2023, 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 Night Taxi Driver, Adventures of a Lifetime Driving the Wrong Way (“Night Taxi, Adventures of a Life Against the Current”, Garzanti, 2024, untranslated), a book published at the beginning of the summer.
Robby shares his sometimes unusual nocturnal encounters, his passion for the Red Sox, the Boston 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, a neighborhood, he’s the one I call.”, confides his writer friend Carlo Lucarelli, who made the taxi driver one of the characters in his latest thriller.
While he is invited to all the bookstores of the Peninsula, the release of the book has reinforced his image of “Italy’s most famous taxi”. And for good reason, it is an indictment against one of Italy’s incurable evils: tax evasion. Everything changed on social networks when, in May 2023, Roberto Mantovani decided to publish on his X account (still Twitter at the time), the details of his monthly gross income. According to official tax figures, an Italian driver earns on average 1,300 euros gross per month. However, the revealed income of the Bolognese “taxi driver” sometimes borders on 10,000 euros gross monthly. Robby cannot stand the complaints of his colleagues against the thieving State, while many work illegally.
The law of silence
“You’re going to kill our profession,” a colleague who, like him, works for Cotabo, the Bolognese taxi cooperative, tells him. “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 would think was imported from Calabria, land of the mafia organization ‘Ndrangheta. The one Roberto makes speak is a colleague, whom he has named “Benito”, the incarnation of a profession gangrened according to him by corporatism.
In the summer of 2022, Mario Draghi’s government required taxi drivers to have a credit card payment terminal, provoking anger in the profession. In several cities, many of them went on strike. Robby recounts the WhatsApp loops where people boast about having made a “clean day”, namely managed to get paid only in cash. The driver had not measured the shock wave that he was going to cause.
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