call for the Great Fireboat of Venice to save their church from fire. Finally, Luigi manages to reach the Great Fireboat of Venice, which sets out to save the church. The other gondoliers notice that Luigi did not return with the fireboat, and discover him sailing on the turbulent waters of the Grand Canal. Covered by the noise of the storm, Luigi is finally able to realize his dream of singing on the Grand Canal, singing songs from Bellini and all the solos he knows. All the gondoliers witness this and they talk about it all night. After the storm, the Queen of Corsica visits. She requests a gondolier to sing for her on her royal boat. One gondolier starts to sing ’O sole mio, but sings terribly to the queen's disgust. It is discovered that all gondoliers have started to sing terribly from that moment on, and so no-one asks them to sing anymore. Luigi is reinstated as a gondolier, without the requirement to sing. After a long career and happy life, as with all gondoliers when they die, Luigi is set in his black boat and pushed out into the Adriatic Sea. Background Goldman says he got the idea to write the book when visiting Venice with his then-wife: We were on one of the water buses, Vaporettos, and a bunch of gondoliers came rowing down the canal and they were quiet. I suddenly turned to [my wife] Ilene and I said, 'I know why the gondoliers don't sing' and we got off the bus immediately and I went running back to the hotel. I wrote the story down in about five minutes on a piece of paper. Goldman says this was one of the few times that a novel had popped into his head "fully formed", the other being No Way to Treat a Lady. References Egan, Sean, William Goldman: The Reluctant Storyteller, Bear Manor Media 2014 1983 American novels Novels by William Goldman Works published under a pseudonym Novels set in Venice