Marco Polo, un’educazione veneziana

What did it mean to grow up in Venice around the year 1260? Marco Polo has often been seen as the typical Venetian merchant, but this is not quite what he is, not entirely anyway. Marco Polo was above all an adventurer who remained for some seventeen years in China, employed by the Great Khan Qubilai. Seeing him as a just a trading merchant would actually mean to reduce his figure to a historiographical reading grid inherited from the nineteenth century, and have him, or Venice, as the representatives of a triumphant pre-modern capitalism in the heart of the Middle Ages. This paper will, however, endeavour to return to an aspect of Marco Poloʼs life often neglected for lack of documents, his Venetian youth before his departure at the age of seventeen to China. Such a return will make it possible to understand how the fortune of a clan, the Polo, was built. But il will mainly give an opportunity to reassess what it really meant to be a Venetian merchant at this time. Actually, it did not mean to be a simple merchant in the first meaning of the word, a trade professional, but being part of a collective destiny and a community of faith in a city opened to the world and trying to leave its mark on it; a city whose collective education prepared the young Marco to face unknown and perfectly unpredictable horizons, the basic aim of any true education indeed.