Grove Koger
Should you find yourself in Venice this year, you have a particular treat in store—one above and beyond the enormous pleasure of simply being in La Serenissima. It seems that Venice, with the collaboration of the Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia and the Italian Cultural Institute of Shanghai, has mounted an exhibition to mark the 700th anniversary of the death of its most famous citizen, who died there on January 8, 1324.
We don’t know the day of Marco Polo’s birth, although the year seems to have been 1254, and there’s even some uncertainty over the place of his birth, with Venice and the Croatian island of Korčula both claiming him as a native son. However, since Korčula was a Venetian possession at the time of Marco’s birth, the question isn’t a particularly pressing one.
In any case, more than 300 artifacts relating to the explorer are on display in the Doge’s Palace, many of them loaned by the countries through which Marco is thought to have traveled. You can even see the explorer’s handwritten will. The Worlds of Marco Polo: The Journey of a 13th-Century Venetian Merchant runs through September 29, so you have plenty of time to make your plans.
I wrote about Marco in my 2002 book When the Going Was Good, and below is what I had to say.
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The Description of the World (Divisament dou monde), 1299
For most of us, Marco Polo is the quintessential traveler, yet we know little about him. He was born into a noted Venetian mercantile family, two of whose members—Marco’s father Niccolo and uncle Maffeo—had already made the long journey east. When they set out on a second expedition to China in 1271, they took Niccolo’s son with them. The three returned in 1295 after an absence of twenty-four years.
Marco might never have recorded his impressions of Asia had he not been captured in a naval battle between Venice and Genoa and imprisoned in the latter city. It was here that he met one Rustichello de Pisa, an experienced writer who took down his account. The resulting book—originally entitled Divisament dou monde—appeared in 1299, the year Marco was freed, but is commonly known to us today as The Travels of Marco Polo.
Marco’s actual journey through western and Central Asia to the Mongol capital of Shangtu (northwest of today’s Beijing) takes up only the first chapters of his book. Most of the remainder are devoted to celebrations of Mongol ruler Kublai Khan (into whose service Marco had entered) and to descriptions of the kingdoms and cities that the Mongols had so recently conquered. A list of modern countries that the explorer passed through would include Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, China, Burma, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, and Turkey.
Marco’s seemingly endless lists, the fruit of his merchant’s eye, can be dry and uninvolving, and his virtual absence from his own book is frustrating to modern readers. Yet he introduced a world of wonders to his fellow Westerners, reportedly asserting on his deathbed that he had not revealed half of what he had actually seen. (If true, the assertion might account for the fact that he failed to mention the Great Wall of China, which would have been virtually impossible to overlook.) Marco’s message, albeit challenged from time to time, is that of every traveler before and since: I was there!
Due to the early period in which the Description was produced, a number of versions of it exist. Among English translations, those prepared by Sir Henry Yule contain extensive notes and numerous illustrations. The last of these (published in 1902 as The Book of Ser Marco Polo, the Venetian: Concerning the Kingdoms and Marvels of the East) was completed by Henri Cordier, who went on to publish yet another volume of notes in 1920. A three-volume reprint published by Dover in 1993 includes Yule’s complete 1902 text as well as Cordier’s 1920 supplement. The translation prepared by Manuel Komroff (numerous editions) corrects William Marsden’s 1818 translation against Yule’s, regularizes the numbering of its chapters to match Yule’s, and includes an introduction for the general reader. The Penguin edition (1958) is translated with an introduction by Ronald Latham.
And for a highly imaginative take on the explorer, I recommend the 1972 novel Le città invisibili by Italo Calvino, translated into English as Invisible Cities. It’s made up of descriptions of 55 cities as described by Marco to Mongol emperor Kublai Khan, cities that are not only imaginary but fantastic. In turn, the novel inspired a 2013 opera by Christopher Cerrone that was staged in Union Station in Los Angeles while the station was in operation. The work was a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for music.
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