Italo Calvino reading from Invisible Cities by Carmen Lobo published on 2015-03-21T09:58:25Z The Travels of Marco Polo—tales told by the Venetian explorer to Italian romance writer Rustichello da Pisa—purportedly describes in great detail Polo’s encounter with “The East,” a place in the medieval European mind as alien and fantastical as the interstellar realms of science fiction. Like other travel narratives of the period (notably the spurious Travels of Sir John Mandeville), Polo’s stories mixed accurate geographical and cultural information with folklore, myth, and Orientalist misapprehension. While the appearance of monsters and marvels seems capricious to the modern reader, these elements may have felt almost mundane to Polo’s contemporaries. Or maybe not. After all, the Italian title of Polo’s travelogue—Il Milione—may refer to Polo’s reputation as the teller of “a million” lies. Source: openculture.com Genre italo calvino