upfront
After 50 years in a taxi… A long, winding trip for one driver, and his city. Words: Elisabetta Povoledo
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rom his front-seat perch, Alberto Tomassi, a Roman taxi driver for 50 years, has been both eavesdropper and confessor. He has played impromptu guide, thwarted muggings and rushed countless clients to the emergency room. He has consoled abandoned wives with a dose of homespun wisdom. “I told one woman whose husband had left her for someone much younger: ‘As we say in Rome, when one pope dies, you make another.’” Expertly navigating Rome’s narrow, potholed streets – many conceived centuries before the internal combustion engine – he has developed the unflappable calm of a Zen monk. “If you can get through the first 15 years without getting really
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angry, you can do it forever,” Tomassi said. “I just take things as they come.” Only a handful of taxi drivers have managed to navigate Rome’s notorious traffic – a mix of bad roads and drivers’ aversion to rules that is a national characteristic – for five decades. “It’s a tough job – alternating night and day shifts, dealing with the smog, the traffic, the stress, the unruly drivers,” said Loreno Bittarelli, president of Tomassi’s radio taxi cooperative. “After 50 years you don’t get a great pension,” Bittarelli said. “You can risk dying of hunger if you retire early.” In Italy, taxi drivers contribute as self-employed workers to the national social security system, which allocates pensions based on those contributions. Bittarelli was
Tomassi, who has been a taxi driver in Rome for 50 years, with his eighth cab, in front of the Colosseum
also upset that Roman taxi drivers are often maligned as a privileged lobby that fights things like the liberalisation of licences. “I don’t know how many public services work as well as we do,” he said. “Alberto sacrificed a lot to keep working, it’s humiliating that anyone would consider his work as privileged.” For his part, Tomassi was disappointed that his achievement wasn’t officially recognised this year – no party, no gold watch, no tribute – so he decided to place a round silver sticker emblazoned with ‘50 years of taxi’ on the rear window of his cab. Tomassi began driving on February 5, 1966, after he bought a taxi licence for five million Italian lire. “It was an awful lot of money,” he said, about the same as the cost to buy a midsize apartment.