Venice: Pure City полностью

The Venetians were expert, and famous, cartographers. They were looking for fixity, and certainty, in their watery world. It is easy to understand their obsession in a city where map and reality rarely meet. Map-making represents the desire for order and control. It is another aspect of the all-observing government. The Venetian authorities, for example, commissioned many detailed maps on all aspects of the provinces on the mainland under their dominion. It was perhaps in this spirit of conquest that a Venetian cartographer wrote the first essay on landscape painting. There were no landscapes in Venice. Landscapes could only be created out of colonised territory. In 1448 another Venetian map-maker, Andrea Bianco, first intimated the existence of the Americas by drawing an “island” in the approximate position of Brazil. A Venetian, Giovanni Contarini, executed the first accurate map of Africa at the beginning of the sixteenth century.

Maps of the world covered the walls of the houses of the prominent merchants and patricians. The apartments of the ducal palace were decorated with maps that outlined the trading routes of Venice across the known world. In a painting of the mid-eighteenth century by Pietro Longhi, “The Geography Lesson,” a fashionable patrician lady consults a globe with a pair of compasses in her right hand; an open atlas lies at her feet. Fra Mauro himself, a Benedictine monk from Murano, created a famous mappamundi complete with symbolic detail and scriptural reference. He declared that he had created it “for the meditation of the illustrious rulers” of the city. By the middle of the fifteenth century there was a workshop in Venice devoted wholly to the production of maps. The Venetian map-makers were particularly renowned for their portolano charts, maps of coastlines designed specifically for the use of sailors. In 1648 there was established in Venice an Academy of the Argonauts that specialised in the publication of maps and globes.

It is no wonder, therefore, that a copy of The Travels of Marco Polo was kept in the Rialto. Polo is the most famous of all Venetians, with the possible exception of Casanova, and he is the most famous of all travellers. His was in one sense a typical Venetian business story. He was part of a trading family. There were once two brothers, born in the Venetian parish of S. Giovanni Grisostomo, who were at the head of a mercantile house in Constantinople; it was a branch of their family business. They were patricians but, in Venice, patricians thrived on trade.

In 1260 Niccolò and Matteo Polo, at a time of great turmoil in the Byzantine city, decided to travel east in order to find new markets. They took with them a stock of jewels, well hidden in their clothes, and began a long journey into Central Asia. They made their way to the city of Bukhara, in the region now known as Uzbekistan, where wars and rumours of war delayed their progress for almost three years. It was their good fortune, however, to become acquainted with some envoys on their way to the court of the Great Khan, “the lord of all the Tartars in the world.” It was not an opportunity to be missed. So they travelled to the city of Kublai Khan. The emperor was courteous and inquisitive; he questioned them closely about the laws and customs of their society. At the end of their stay in Peking, he entrusted them with a message for the pope and requested them to return to him with oil taken from the lamps that burned before the sepulchre of Christ in Jerusalem.

It took them another three and a half years to make their way back to Venice. They had not seen their city for fifteen years and, on their return, Niccolò Polo found in the household a son who was now sixteen. He had been named after the guardian saint of Venice. Eventually they received letters of papal blessing and privilege from the new pope, Gregory X, and were able to take a phial of the precious oil. Then they returned to the court of Kublai Khan, with young Marco Polo as part of their company. Once more their journey lasted for three and a half years. Yet the most intriguing part is yet to tell. Twenty-four years later, three strangers arrived in the parish of S. Giovanni Grisostomo. They wore coats of coarse wool like Tartar warriors. They had long hair and long beards, their skin harshly burned with long exposure. Marco Polo, together with his father and uncle, had finally returned home.