The Warm and Reassuring Voice of Rome's Metro B Passes Away

On Wednesday, March 13th, Luciano De Luca, the voice of Metro B, passed away in Rome at the age of 69. He had always been passionate about technology, so much so that he joined Acotral as an electronic expert. Thanks to his voice, seen by all as 'warm and reassuring', he became the symbol of the blue line. Luciano De Luca was born in Rome under the sign of Aquarius, on February 8, 1954. He lived in the Prenestino Labicano district. He graduated from the Giorgi technical industrial institute with a focus on computer science in Rome and began his career as an electronics teacher in some technical institutes in Rome. In 1979, he joined the Ismv department (Special installations and various mechanisms), the branch that managed ticketing systems: in summary, he was responsible for repairing faulty ticket validators. De Luca won a competition as an electronic expert announced by the company Acotral, which later became Cotral from which Met.Ro derives, finally merged with Atac. As soon as he joined the company, he collaborated on the opening of Rome's Metro A on February 16, 1980. The announcements heard in the stations are recorded, and that of Metro B had been recorded inside De Luca's offices. His son Alessio told Romatoday how all this had been realized: 'My father recorded the first audio messages as a test to demonstrate its operation to his superiors. The system worked, and he was asked to implement it for all the stops of what was then Metro B. The tests had been recorded 'in an improvised recording room in my bedroom with a microphone costing a few euros. Those messages were conceived as a test, but they were chosen by the company management as the official voice of Metro B. For all his projects, I was always his trusted consultant, inheriting from him the passion for computing ever since we 'played' together programming the Commodore 64 he gave me and, before that, his Texas Instrument TI/99-4°.' His son recounted a particularly peculiar episode concerning Metro B1, opened in 2012: 'Meanwhile, at home, we had equipped ourselves with more professional equipment, such as a condenser microphone and sound card, which we decided to use for the new recordings. Their performance on the particular speakers installed on the platforms was not liked, and it was decided to go back to using the old PC microphone from the '90s costing a few euros.' When he retired, in March 2019, his colleagues wanted to pay tribute to him with a plaque: 'The Voice of Subway'.