Here you’ll see a plaque dedicated to Marco Polo, who apparently live in this house. The great explorer left Venice as a teenager in 1271 on a voyage that has become legendary. Together with his father and uncle, after three and a half years he reached the city of Khanbaliq, which we today call Beijing, in China. On the way, they were escorted to the Kublai Khan, emperor of Mongolia and one of the most powerful men in the world, who was so impressed with young Marco that he employed him as his ambassador, a job that the Venetian kept for 17 years. On his return to Venice, he was captured by the Genoese navy, who were Venice’s naval arch-enemy, and sent to prison; here, however, as luck had it, his cellmate was a young storyteller who, fascinated by the tales of this traveller, decided to write them down and turned them into a bestelling book, which became known as the Milion; it aquired this name once Marco Polo had finally returned to Venice, since people would flock to his home here to hear the million incredible stories of his epic journey to the East.
