You can call him "Robby." That's what 55-year-old Roberto Mantovani's friends and family in Bologna call him. But for the past year, the man who drives his Volkswagen Touran through the streets of the capital of Emilia-Romagna, in northern Tuscany, hasn't had just friends, especially within his profession. After working as a firefighter and then at the municipal pound, Mantovani, whom "M Le Magazine du Monde" met in May 2023, took the plunge and bought himself a cab license in 2016. "The most beautiful job in the world in the most beautiful city in the world," he recounted in Tassista di Notte, Avventure di una Vita Contromano ("Night Taxi Driver, Adventures of a Contrarian Life," Garzanti, 2024, untranslated), a book published over the summer.

In it, Robby shares his sometimes unusual nocturnal encounters, his passion for the Boston Red Sox, and his love for his city. "Roberto talks about Bologna like no one else. When I have a question about a street or a neighborhood, he's the one I call," said his writer friend Carlo Lucarelli, who made the cab driver one of the characters in his latest thriller.

The release of his book, for which he has been invited by bookstores all over Italy, has reinforced his image as "Italy's most famous cab driver." Understandably so, as it is an indictment of one of Italy's incurable ills: tax evasion. Everything came to a head on social media when, in May 2023, Mantovani decided to publish details of his monthly gross receipts on his X account (still Twitter at the time). According to official tax figures, the average Italian driver earns €1,300 gross per month. However, the Bolognese taximan revealed earnings sometimes nearing €10,000 gross per month. Robby couldn't stand hearing his colleagues complain about the state stealing their money, even though many of them were working under the table.

"You're going to kill our profession," warned a colleague who, like him, works for Cotabo, the Bolognese cab cooperative. "If you want to talk about cabs, the only rule is to say positive things. We're a family, united and untouchable," he wrote in his book. A code of silence that seems imported from Calabria, home of the 'Ndrangheta mafia organization. Roberto's colleague, whom he called "Benito," is the embodiment of a profession he believes to be corrupted by corporatism.

In the summer of 2022, Mario Draghi's government required cab drivers to be equipped with a credit card reader, drawing the ire of the profession. In several cities, many of them went on strike. Robby talked about the WhatsApp groups where they boasted about having had a "clean day," i.e., managing to be paid only in cash. What the driver didn't realize was the storm he was about to cause.

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