Marco PoloVerified

Marco Polo's firsthand account of his thirteen-year journey across Asia captures a world of exotic courts, treacherous deserts, and merchant cities in vivid detail that reads less like fantasy and more like the ultimate travel memoir from a man who actually went there.

Marco Polo's account of his twenty-four-year journey across deserts and through the courts of the Mongol empire reads like adventure filtered through the observations of a merchant-diplomat fascinated by spices, infrastructure, and military tactics. His descriptions reveal a medieval world of staggering cosmopolitanism that explodes the myth of isolated, insular continents. Volume 2 captures his ventures into southeast Asia and his eventual journey home, where the greatest treasures prove to be stories no one back in Venice quite believes.