Il Milione di Marco Polo (Italian Edition)

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On returning to Venice with the riches and treasures they had gathered along the way, they found a city at war with Genoa. Marco joined the war but was captured in and put in prison.

He spent his time telling his cellmate all about his travels. This friend wrote them down, along with some of his own stories. The resulting book, The Travels of Marco Polo, soon spread across the continent. Marco was released in and became a successful merchant in Venice. Other things named after the explorer include: I live in Genoa and pass every day by the prison where Marco Polo dictated his notes as they say to Rustichello da Pisa, who wrote them in French.

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The Travels of Marco Polo, by Marco Polo : APPENDIX H. — Bibliography of Marco Polo’s Book.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Some have questioned whether Marco had actually travelled to China or was just repeating stories that he had heard from other travellers.

Economic historian Mark Elvin concludes that recent work "demonstrates by specific example the ultimately overwhelming probability of the broad authenticity" of Polo's account, and that the book is, "in essence, authentic, and, when used with care, in broad terms to be trusted as a serious though obviously not always final, witness. The source of the title Il Milione is debated.

Il Milione Di Marco Polo: Adapted As A Beginning Reader

One view is it comes from the Polo family's use of the name Emilione to distinguish themselves from the numerous other Venetian families bearing the name Polo. Modern assessments of the text usually consider it to be the record of an observant rather than imaginative or analytical traveller. Marco Polo emerges as being curious and tolerant, and devoted to Kublai Khan and the dynasty that he served for two decades.

The Polo party left Venice in The journey took 3 years after which they arrived in Cathay as it was then called and met the grandson of Genghis Khan , Kublai Khan. They left China in late or early [8] and were back in Venice in The tradition is that Polo dictated the book to a romance writer, Rustichello da Pisa , while in prison in Genoa between — Rustichello may have worked up his first Franco-Italian version from Marco's notes.

The Travels is divided into four books. Book Two describes China and the court of Kublai Khan.

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Book Three describes some of the coastal regions of the East: Book Four describes some of the then-recent wars among the Mongols and some of the regions of the far north, like Russia. Polo's writings included descriptions of cannibals and spice-growers.

The impact of Polo's book on cartography was delayed: Marco Polo's description of the Far East and its riches inspired Christopher Columbus 's decision to try to reach Asia by sea, [ citation needed ] in a westward route. A heavily annotated copy of Polo's book was among the belongings of Columbus.

Marco Polo – the man who brought China to Europe

Marco Polo was accompanied on his trips by his father and uncle both of whom had been to China previously , though neither of them published any known works about their journeys. The book was translated into many European languages in Marco Polo's own lifetime, but the original manuscripts are now lost. The oldest surviving Polo manuscript is in Old French heavily flavoured with Italian; [12] for Luigi Foscolo Benedetto, this "F" text is the basic original text, which he corrected by comparing it with the somewhat more detailed Italian of Ramusio, together with a Latin manuscript in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana.

Other early important sources are R Ramusio's Italian translation first printed in , and Z a fifteenth-century Latin manuscript kept at Toledo, Spain. A total of about copies in various languages are known to exist. During copying and translating many errors were made, so there are many differences between the various copies.

The first attempt to collate manuscripts and provide a critical edition was in a volume of collected travel narratives printed at Venice in The editor, Giovan Battista Ramusio, collated manuscripts from the first part of the fourteenth century, [17] which he considered to be " perfettamente corretto " "perfectly correct". Olschki, , collated sixty additional manuscript sources, in addition to some eighty that had been collected by Henry Yule , for his edition.

It was Benedetto who identified Rustichello da Pisa , [18] as the original compiler or amanuensis , and his established text has provided the basis for many modern translations: Moule and Paul Pelliot published a translation under the title Description of the World that uses manuscript F as its base and attempts to combine the several versions of the text into one continuous narrative while at the same time indicating the source for each section London, University of California ; it had its origins in the celebrations of the seven hundredth anniversary of Marco Polo's birth.

Since its publication, many have viewed the book with skepticism. Some in the Middle Ages viewed the book simply as a romance or fable, largely because of the sharp difference of its descriptions of a sophisticated civilisation in China to other early accounts by Giovanni da Pian del Carpine and William of Rubruck who portrayed the Mongols as "barbarians" who appeared to belong to "some other world".

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Haw however argued that many of the "omissions" could be explained. For example, none of the Western travelers to Yuan dynasty China at that time, such as Giovanni de' Marignolli and Odoric of Pordenone , mentioned the Great Wall, and that while remnants of the Wall would have existed at that time, it would not have been significant or noteworthy as it had not been maintained for a long time.

The Great Walls were built to keep out northern invaders, whereas the ruling dynasty during Marco Polo's visit were those very northern invaders. The Mongol rulers whom Polo served also controlled territories both north and south of today's wall, and would have no reasons to maintain any fortifications that may have remained there from the earlier dynasties.

He noted the Great Wall familiar to us today is a Ming structure built some two centuries after Marco Polo's travels. While the Italian missionary Odoric of Pordenone who visited Yuan China mentioned footbinding it is however unclear whether he was only relaying something he heard as his description is inaccurate , [24] no other foreign visitors to Yuan China mentioned the practice, perhaps an indication that the footbinding was not widespread or was not practiced in an extreme form at that time. It has also been pointed out that Polo's accounts are more accurate and detailed than other accounts of the periods.

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Polo had at times denied the "marvelous" fables and legends given in other European accounts, and also omitted descriptions of strange races of people then believed to inhabit eastern Asia and given in such accounts. For example, Odoric of Pordenone said that the Yangtze river flows through the land of pygmies only three spans high and gave other fanciful tales, while Giovanni da Pian del Carpine spoke of "wild men, who do not speak at all and have no joints in their legs", monsters who looked like women but whose menfolk were dogs, and other equally fantastic accounts.

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