On January 8, 2024, 700 years will have passed since Marco Polo’s demise, thus providing us with an opportunity to rediscover the genius and the greatness of an individual who has been as the centre of endless literature, in a wide variety of languages. The time is ripe to revive his extraordinary travel stories, which introduced the distant, fabulous Orient to Christian Europe. Yet, in this book, the author completely overturns the mainstream viewpoint and leads his readers on a journey through Marco Polo’s Venice. In doing so, he draws upon Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” and provides a portrait of the port from which Marco Polo set sail as a youth and to which he returned as a seasoned man. But the book also describes the cities he visited during his travels: Trebizond, Tabriz, Constantinople and Acre, to name just a few. The lagoon city, the Mediterranean Sea, the “other Venices”; the culture and the mentality of a society of merchants; the exploits on an endless sea, capable of projecting contemporary Venetians into infinity: these are the ingredients of a fantastic voyage in which, for once, Marco Polo remains in the background and relinquishes the centre stage to Venice – imagined, experienced, abandoned and then rediscovered – and its mirage.

Ermanno Orlando teaches Medieval History at the Siena University for Foreigners.