Taxi drivers in Rome will go on a good manners course, the Italian Republic newspaper reports.

Author of the idea is the local administration and the board of tourists, according to which taxi drivers are the city's representatives because they are often the first people to contact the foreign tourist and are therefore obliged to be a symbol of the Roman hospitality.

The capital of Italy earns EUR 1 billion a year from visits to foreigners, and taxi drivers come into contact with thousands of them every day. That's why it is important what impressions they will leave and what tourists will tell about their family vacation in Rome after they return home. The course includes spoken English language education, emphasizing the quality of the service offered, the choice of attractive routes with interesting information for the tourists about the sites that they pass through, the combination of both the most famous and the less familiar, but interesting for foreigners.

Drivers will be required first of all to be gentlemen, to respond with restraint to congestion and holes in the asphalt.