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Marco Polo

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Marco Polo (1254 - 1323) was a Venetian merchant and explorer who, together with his father and uncle, was among the first Westerners to travel the Silk Road all the way to China. They lived there for seventeen years. They returned to Venice. During the wars of Venice in Italy, Marco was captured and held prisoner. Then he dictated to Rusticello da Pisa a widely read book (Il Milione) about his travels.

While most historians do not doubt that Marco Polo did indeed reach China, in recent times some skepticism has been advanced as to whether Polo actually visited China or only retold information he had heard from others. Among other omissions, his account fails to mention chopsticks, tea, foot-binding, or the Great Wall, and Chinese records of the time do not mention him, despite the fact that he claimed to have served as a special emissary to Kublai Khan.

Some Croats claim that he was born in the Venetian island of Curzola in the Adriatic (currently Kurcola, Croatia) and even that the Polo family was Slav in origin.

References

Marco Polo is also a popular children's game played in a pool.

The child who is "it" must swim around the pool with his eyes closed, attempting to tag the other players. The "it" child can only sense where the other players are by calling out "Marco!," at which point all the other players are required to yell "Polo!". By judging where the sounds are coming from, the child who is "it" is able to overcome his self-imposed blindness and hopefully tag somebody else, who then becomes "it." There are other rules to this game, varying from region to region (see 'fish out of water').