Unfortunately taxi licenses are assigned very scarcely and the resulting huge disproportion between demand and offer creates a market in which old drivers when retiring sell their ones at absurd prices, that is, even over $200K.
That makes it sound like the license acts as a proxy for a pension. If so, $200K is really not absurd at all. That's a very small pension, and Uber's disruption of the market is going to mean a lot of Italian taxi drivers have a horrible time living in poverty in their old age. That's obviously not Uber's fault, but it's understandable that the taxi drivers and the government would be very much against a sudden change to the status quo.