Because the taxi is called that

It would derive from the Thurn und Taxis family (hence the word "taxi") which, in the 18th century, in addition to distributing mail throughout Europe, also engaged in passenger transport.

There are several versions regarding the origin of the term taxi. There is a hypothesis of a historical nature, linked to the mail distribution system, which sees the German noble family Thurn und Taxis as protagonists (from which the word "taxi" would derive).

FROM MAIL TO PEOPLE. The family, descended from princes of the Holy Roman Empire, had the task of spreading and managing the postal system in Europe since the fifteenth century and maintained the monopoly until 1866.

But what does the mail have to do with the private transport of passengers? Before the birth of motor cars, those who needed to move urgently used a horse-drawn carriage. At the end of the 18th century, the Thurn und Taxis family, who managed thousands of carriages and horses with which they distributed the mail, diversified their business, also using them for passenger transport.

ITALIAN ORIGINS. Few know that the noble family, a pioneer in the mail distribution sector, was of Italian origin. In 1504, in fact, the two brothers from Bergamo, Zanetto and Francesco Tasso, received the monopoly of the postal service throughout the empire from Emperor Maximilian I of Habsburg. At the end of the eighteenth century the Tasso family (Germanized in Thurn und Taxis) managed 20,000 "masters of post", thousands of horses and castles and was one of the richest in Europe.

OTHER ASSUMPTIONS. A second, more philological version of the term, on the other hand, would trace the word "taxi" back to tax (cost), contained in the word taximeter, an invention of 1891 by the German German Wilhelm Bruhn (1869-1951) which spread throughout the world and is still in use today.

A third hypothesis attributes the origin of "taxi" to the Greek adjective tachus which means "fast", in reference to the characteristic of being a fast way to move.

THE TAXI ARRIVES. In Italy, in 1908, Fiat produced the first Italian motor taxi model, known as the Fiat Tipo 1. Approximately 1,600 examples were made for taxi use only. And in 1940, when the first radio systems became widespread, cars began communicating with each other to make the service more efficient.

During Fascism, "taxi" was one of those words that the regime did not like: as early as 1923, in fact, Mussolini had promoted a campaign, with fines, to eradicate words of foreign origin from everyday language and replace them with alternative terms, also invented. To entice citizens to cleanse their language of the "grass of foreign words", in 1932 the Roman newspaper La Tribuna announced a competition with a prize of one thousand lire for anyone who could find the best translation for some "exotic" words including taxi, la the chosen translation was "tassì", which won on auto public, tax car and public car.