A changing of the guard at one of Titano’s historic companies: after a lifetime at the helm of the transport firm founded by his father Fortunato in 1946, Roberto Benedettini has announced his resignation as President, entrusting the company to his nephew Michael. The full statement follows.
San Marino, 18 September 2026
There are days when an entrepreneur signs not a balance sheet, but a page of history. Yesterday was one of those days.
After a lifetime devoted to the company founded by my family, I am resigning as President of Fratelli Benedettini S.p.A. and entrusting the leadership of the company to my nephew Michael Benedettini, the third generation of our family.
I do so with the serenity of one who knows he is handing over a solid business into young hands, full of energy and enthusiasm, and with the emotion of one who, in every mile driven by our buses, has always seen my father’s face.
It was 7 March 1946. The war had ended only a few months earlier, the railway linking San Marino to Rimini lay in ruins, and the country needed to start moving again. My father Fortunato, whom everyone on Titano called Nando, and his brother Giuseppe, two of the fourteen Benedettini siblings, took two buses — a Fiat 621 and a Fiat 626 — and launched the first scheduled route between San Marino and Rimini. The plate on that first coach read SM 001: number one. Not out of pride, but because someone had to be first to believe that reconstruction could also travel by road.
Eighty years have passed since that day. Eighty years of journeys, of millions of miles and millions of passengers; of connections linking the Republic to the Riviera, to Bologna, to Italy; of crises weathered with heads held high — the most recent, the pandemic, the hardest in our history — and of one principle never negotiated: the company is a family, and the family is a company at the service of its country.
None of what we built would have been possible alone. My first thought goes to my brother Pierluigi, with whom I have shared every business decision for more than thirty years: this story is ours, written by four hands, day after day, without the family’s unity ever being called into question. Just as Giuseppe and Nando did, so have we.
To Michael, and with him to the whole third generation, I handed over yesterday not a company, but a responsibility: to our employees, to the passengers who entrust us with their journeys every day, to the Republic of San Marino, and to the memory of those who, in 1946, set out with two buses and a promise. I know they will honor it, because they have breathed it in since childhood.
As for me, I am not stopping: I will dedicate myself with renewed energy to the Rimini Calcio project, to the growth of its young players, and to other business ventures in Italy. The role changes, the spirit does not: keep building, keep serving.
My father used to say that a bus is never empty, because it always carries with it the trust of those waiting for it at the stop. After eighty years, that trust remains intact. Now it is Michael’s turn to steer it toward the next eighty.
Bon voyage, Fratelli Benedettini.
Roberto Benedettini
Outgoing President, Fratelli Benedettini S.p.A.
