Marco Polo - Great Lives

Marco Polo's amazing journey to China and his 20 year odyssey to the ends of the earth is justly famous. His own terse but detailed record of what he saw has been a popular classic of travel literature ever since his death 650 years ago. But Marco's story is more of a vast travel guide than a personal account; and Humble feels that the personal side of Marco's travels has been sadly neglected. It was - amd remains - an epic of human adventure. He met with so many trials and dangers in 25 years of constant travelling that the odds were heavily stacked against his ever getting home to his native Venice to tell the tale. Small wonder that when he did, the hard-headed Venetians of his day dismissed his stories as romantic exaggeration...