The Travels of Marco Polo: the story of the wonders of China in the first travel diary of history
If we think of China, of its history and its ancient origins, we can think of the marvelous adventures of Marco Polo, the young Venetian famous for having gone until the mythical Catai, more than all the travelers who at the time traveled the Silk Road. Thanks to the determined scribes and then to the invention of the press, his testimonies and his stories have come down to us more vivid than ever, collected in the "Book of Wonders", better known as "The Travels of Marco Polo". In what has become the first travel diary of history is contained the Serbian Odyssey, an adventurous journey full of emotions to discover a new, distant, mythical and exotic world. In fact, the young Marco writes with great precision all the details of those marvelous places, which he will then dictate to his zealous companion of Genoese captivity in the years of the conflict between the two maritime republics.
Starting from the first stages of the journey, which will keep him away from his land for 24 years, Polo describes the desert, the mountain on which it was said to stop the Noah's Ark, the mountain of Armenia, and then the tomb of the Magi in the heart of Persia and a strange oil in Baku, a brown and turbid oil, our "black gold". Marco Polo is in fact the first European to talk about those goods that for us have become indispensable in the centuries, such as oil or the engine of the industrial revolution, coal, which Marco describes as burning black nuggets, widely used in China to make warm baths. He also talks about asbestos, at that time called "salamandra", a mineral that was extracted in the region of Sinkiang Uighur, resistant to high temperatures. The Venetian Ulysses meticulously outlines all the news that affect his attention, food and drink, rituals and trades, the currency in the kingdom of Kan and the precious merchandise. He describes the rich metropolis, the exotic and pagan customs of the new world, a world that at the time reached the ear of Europe only through myths, fables and rumors, in an aura of mystery, magic and fantasy.
Who would have imagined that there was thousands of miles away, beyond the desert and the mountains, a world so civilized, so populous and as rich in raw materials, if not more, as the European countries. Just read the report of the city to be amazed, especially if compared to that era, full Middle Ages, as evidenced for example the description of the city of Cambaluc, "the city of the world where they come more rare, more valuable things and in greater quantity than any other city in the world. Just think of this: in Cambaluc every day no less than a thousand wagons of silk arrive ". It is nothing short of the original core of Beijing, the capital of China, already then the beating heart of commerce and business. Not to mention river traffic.
Marco describes the thousands of boats that sailed every day along the Yangtze Kiang, one of the longest rivers in the world, and that only in the port of Sinju there were about 15,000 ships. Undoubtedly, these are important figures, but they can only give us an idea of the teeming silk cities, the sparkling ports, the ferment of the precious bazaars, the temples, the crowded streets and the ancestor of the street food. But it was not only wealth and chaos that impressed the Polo. The military value, the religious tolerance between Buddhism and animism and the enlightened systems of government left them truly amazed, for the breadth of views, the goodness and balance that characterized the Tartar people. Suffice it to say that they had created socio-economic measures not only democratic but also liberal, with subsidies for the poor and the sick, a security system, with fire-fighting and riot police, and preventive measures in case of floods that guaranteed reserve granaries. Even the postal system for urgent communications was really efficient. We are therefore facing a highly civilized society, a society that has had its western counterpart only in the ancient Rome, which meanwhile, however, with the crisis of the empire and the Germanic invasions, had fallen back into oblivion and barbarism. China therefore becomes a new stimulus for the West to rise from its ashes and somehow it was like this, thanks to Marco Polo. In fact, his work, defined by scholars as the best description of the Mongolian kingdom, was a source of inspiration for many of his successors, first of all Cristoforo Colombo, and Marco himself was strongly convinced of the importance of his testimony:
"I believe it was God's will that we should come back, so that men might know the things that are in the world".
With his story, in fact, the Venetian merchant was able to open the eyes and the mind of the Europeans towards this still distant and unknown reality, to stimulate curiosity and imagination, to encourage other fearless travelers like him to leave and to live fantastic adventures to tell, a warning and stimulus for the following generations to welcome diversity and transform it into wealth, progress, an investment for the future. Since then, the journey to discover China has never stood still, thanks to the partnership born centuries ago between the two worlds, the east and the west, two sides of the same coin in continuous dialogue and exchange. I am sure that in each of us there is a small Marco Polo, waiting only to sail on the sea of desires, following the route of adventure and discovery.
