THE ORIGINAL GLOBETROTTER
The learned traveller as immortalised in this glass mosaic, a gift from his home city of Venice to Genoa
GETTY X2
For Italian romance writer Rustichello da Pisa, being locked up in a Genoan prison near the end of the 13th century was a blessing in disguise for, in his cell, he stumbled across a story that is still in print today. His cellmate was Marco Polo, the story: the tale of the merchant’s travels. In that dank prison, the 40-something Venetian traveller let his exotic stories of Jerusalem, China, India and beyond unfurl. The caged wordsmith lapped them up. A cosmographycum-memoir, originally entitled Divisament dou Monde (‘Description of the World’) now commonly called The Travels of Marco Polo, was born.