Hidden Cities

I didn’t know until recently that Marco Polo’s travels through China during the 13th Century weren’t in fact written down by him. They were dictated to Rustichello de Pisa, whom Polo shared a prison cell with in Genoa. It’s important here to remember that despite Rome being a hugely important empire, after its fall, Italy was not a singular place until the 19th century. Even though Pisa, Genoa, and Venice seem basically neighbors today, that was not the case for most of their respective histories. When Polo and Rustichello found each other in prison, Venice and Genoa were embroiled in a bitter war as rival maritime powers of the Mediterranean. Polo was captured after leading a battleship against Genoa and thrown in the clink with Rustichello who was captured about a decade earlier during the Genoese-Pisan War. I oversimplified the history because wow, such carnage! Anyway, for a long period of time a lot of people wondered or outright accused Polo of making all this stuff about China…