ROME, April 14 — From his front-seat perch, Alberto Tomassi, a Roman cabdriver for 50 years, has been both eavesdropper and confessor. He has played impromptu tour guide, thwarted muggings and rushed countless clients to the emergency room.

And 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 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.

“And after 50 years, you don’t even 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 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.

Rome in the mid-1960s was experiencing a giddy moment. Amid the long postwar economic boom, the capital was a crossroad of starlets and celebrity chasers, cardinals and cafe society, decaying aristocracy and growing entrepreneurship.

Then as now, celebrities were fodder for the gossip-hungry public, and paparazzi buzzed the streets on swerving scooters scouting nightclubs — like Milleluci and the Grotte del Piccione, long since closed — for their prey.

“Those were the days before the selfies,” Tomassi said.

Over the decades, Tomassi has played tour guide, consoled abandoned wives, taken passengers to the emergency room — and had a front-row seat to a changing Rome. — Picture by Shira Cohen/The New York Times

Unfolding a plastic bag, he gingerly lifted a faded newspaper clipping mounted in a simple frame: a memento from those long-gone days when Rome was known as Hollywood on the Tiber.

A photo showed Tomassi as he squired actors Ursula Andress and Jean-Paul Belmondo around Rome.

“I had my full head of hair,” he said, laughing and looking skyward toward his thinning pate.

He recalled that in that summer of 1967 (“or thereabouts”) the two actors “were very much in love.”

Back then, he could wheel his Fiat 600 Multipla — the first of his eight cabs — around the Arch of Constantine next to the Colosseum, drive straight across Tiber Island, zip around Piazza Navona or drive straight into St. Peter’s Square, areas that have since been made pedestrian-only zones.

“It was a time when people laughed, living the bella vita,” he recalled fondly. “They were beautiful years.”

One disappointment was missing a chance to drive Pope Paul VI around the Vatican Gardens. It’s probably just as well the opportunity didn’t work out, he said.

“If I’d told people that I’d driven the pope, they would have thought I was crazy,” he said. Today, he could probably pull it off, he laughed, acknowledging Pope Francis’ occasional attempts to get out and about like a normal citizen.

Tomassi, who turns 75 in September, has decided it is time to retire. He has a few parties interested in buying his licence, which is worth about €130,000 (RM570,000) these days.

“You don’t get rich doing this job, but it’s honest work,” he said. “You can raise a family, put your kids through school.” His eldest daughter happens to be a traffic police officer in Rome.

“My colleagues joke that I can do what I want because I’ll never be fined,” he said. “Instead I go out of my way not to break laws.”

He admits to one infraction, early on. He got fined for forgetting to wear the yellow smock and cap that Rome taxi drivers once had to wear.

For now, he’s just enjoying his last fares, and proudly acknowledges his silver sticker to those clients who ask.

“Some say, ‘Poor you, 50 years in Rome traffic,'” he said. “Others seem pleased, because it means that they can put up with it, too.” — The New York Times