There’s a detail that surprises anyone who discovers it for the first time: the most famous book ever written about a Venetian traveler was not written in Venice, and perhaps wasn’t even written by him. It was dictated in a Genoese cell, to a Pisan cellmate, while outside the walls the Republic of Genoa celebrated a naval victory that had filled its prisons with enemies. Marco Polo, the man who had traveled across Asia to the court of Kublai Khan, recounted his journey not by free literary choice, but because he had no other way to pass the time as a prisoner.
It is one of the most beautiful paradoxes of Mediterranean history: the great book of the East, the one that would ignite the imagination of generations of European navigators, was born from a military defeat and a cell. And it was born in Genoa, not by a whim of fate, but because Genoa and Venice, in the late thirteenth century, fought for control of the seas with the same ferocity with which today two football teams compete for a championship — except that what was at stake were the trade routes to Constantinople, the Black Sea, the entire East.
Curzola, 1298: the battle that changed everything
To understand how a Venetian patrician ended up a prisoner in Genoa, we must step back to the rivalry that for two centuries ran through the Mediterranean like a seismic fault line. Genoa and Venice were the two maritime superpowers of the era, and their competition — for commercial ports, for privileges in Eastern empires, for control of the Adriatic and Aegean — erupted more than once into open war.
One of the decisive battles in this long conflict was fought in 1298 off the island of Curzola, in the Dalmatian Adriatic. The Genoese fleet, commanded by admiral Lamba Doria, clashed with the Venetian fleet in a battle that ended with a clear Genoese victory: numerous Venetian galleys were captured or sunk, and a great number of Venetian sailors and officers became prisoners. Among them, according to the tradition that has accompanied this story for centuries, was also Marco Polo, who at the time commanded a galley in the Serenissima’s fleet.
After the victory, Genoa found itself managing a considerable number of Venetian prisoners. And it was precisely in one of the city’s prisons — those of Palazzo San Giorgio, on the port front, or according to other versions transmitted over time in an adjacent building — that Marco Polo spent his imprisonment. We do not know for certain how long it lasted: months, perhaps about a year. But it was long enough for something historically enormous to happen in that cell.
Rustichello da Pisa: the cellmate who wrote history
In the same prison, or at any rate in the same Genoese carceral environment, was another prisoner: Rustichello da Pisa, a writer of chivalric romances already known for his works in French, the literary vernacular most widely used at the time in the courts and among educated readers of Europe. Pisa and Genoa had been historical rivals themselves — the Battle of Meloria in 1284 had marked the decline of Pisan naval power — and it is not unlikely that Rustichello was in Genoa as a consequence of those tensions as well.
It was to Rustichello that Marco Polo recounted, day after day, his travels: the years spent in Asia, his encounters with Kublai Khan, the cities unknown to Europe, the goods, the customs, the marvels and oddities of a world that no European reader had ever been able to imagine in such detail. Rustichello transcribed, organized, and probably enriched with his craft as a narrator those oral memories, giving them the form of a book. The result was what posterity would call Il Milione, or Devisement du monde in its original French title.
It is a detail worth emphasizing: the book that fixed forever the Western image of China, of Cathay, of the Indies, was not written by a professional man of letters inspired at his desk, but dictated aloud by a merchant-navigator to a prisoner writer, in a cell, with no books for consultation, no travel notes to refer to — only the memory of a man who had lived in those lands for approximately 24 years, between 1271 and 1295.
Palazzo San Giorgio and Genoa in the late thirteenth century
The place where this story unfolded is not a secondary detail. Palazzo San Giorgio, which today overlooks the Porto Antico with its frescoed façade and its stratified history of diverse functions over the centuries, was already by the end of the thirteenth century one of the city’s most important public buildings. It was built in 1260 at the behest of the captain of the people Guglielmo Boccanegra, as the inscription on the façade still recalls today, and among its functions it also housed that of prison — a use not uncommon for buildings of public power in the Middle Ages, where justice, administration, and detention often shared the same spaces.
Genoa, in those years, was a city at the height of its Mediterranean expansion: trading colonies in Caffa in Crimea, in Pera opposite Constantinople, a stable presence in the main ports of the Black Sea and the Levant. A city of merchant-warriors, where the boundary between commerce, diplomacy and armed conflict was razor-thin, and where prisoners of war like Marco Polo were not treated as common criminals, but as hostages of rank — often awaiting ransom, often with considerable freedom of movement and social interaction within prison walls.
It is in this context that the very possibility must be understood that two prisoners from different cities, both rivals of Genoa, could converse for months, exchange stories, build a book together. Medieval imprisonment, for figures of that social rank, could resemble forced seclusion with margins of sociability more than absolute isolation.
What remains of that history today
Walking today along the front of the Porto Antico, with Palazzo San Giorgio reflected in the water of the Darsena just a few steps from the Galata Museo del Mare, it is difficult not to think of that cell and those conversations. The building has passed through centuries of transformations — it has served as the seat of public offices, the San Giorgio Company, the Banco di San Giorgio, one of the most powerful and long-lived financial institutions in European history — but its location, right on the harbor front, still tells today of the central role that area has always had in the life of the Republic.
Those staying in one of the residences in the heart of Genoa, perhaps just a few steps from the historic port, walk every day on the same cobblestones that once saw the victorious galleys of Lamba Doria arrive laden with Venetian prisoners. The caruggi that branch out behind the port — that labyrinth of narrow alleys that remains to this day one of the most extensive medieval historic centers in Europe — preserved even then the same urban structure we see today: tall buildings, narrow streets to protect from sun and wind, a city built for maritime commerce before it was built for living.
A curiosity few know: Columbus read Marco Polo
There is a thread connecting this story to another of the great protagonists of Genoese history, almost two centuries later. Christopher Columbus owned a copy of Marco Polo’s Travels, and he annotated it in the margins with his own handwriting — that copy, preserved today at the Biblioteca Colombina in Seville, shows signs of very careful, almost obsessive reading of Marco Polo’s descriptions of Cathay, Cipango, the islands rich in gold and spices of the Far East.
When Columbus set sail in 1492 convinced he could reach Asia by sailing west, he had in mind — literally, among the pages he had consulted and annotated — the descriptions that a Venetian prisoner had dictated two centuries earlier in a Genoese cell. It is one of those historical short circuits that connect seemingly distant eras and destinies: the defeat of Curzola, Marco Polo’s imprisonment, the book born out of boredom and necessity in a cell, and finally the voyage that would open to Europeans an entire unknown continent. Genoa, in a certain sense, was the place where the idea of the Orient took the form of a book that would nourish, centuries later, the dream of another route, the one toward the west.
A history to live, not just to read
What makes this story extraordinary is not just the anecdote itself, but the fact that all its places are still there, tangible, walkable. There is no need to imagine: you just have to walk. The port that saw the arrival of the galleys of victory, the building that hosted the imprisonment, the caruggi that wind behind the waterfront — everything has remained surprisingly legible, layered but not erased by the centuries that followed.
Genoa has this rare quality among European cities: it has not relegated its past to display cases separate from daily life, it has let it live within the stones, within the urban fabric that is still traversed on foot today, between a bar and a shop, between a noble palace and an alley that smells of freshly baked focaccia. Those staying here do not simply visit a city of art: they enter a story spanning a thousand years, of which the story of Marco Polo and Rustichello is only one of the most surprising chapters.
If this story has piqued your curiosity, if the idea of sleeping just steps away from the place where one of the most influential books in Western history was born fascinates you as much as it fascinates us, then Genoa awaits you with all its layered centuries. Choose one of our residences in the heart of the historic city, and let the caruggi, the port, the stones tell you the rest — we, as always, welcome guests with passion.
