It occurred to me that since the city of Venice is so dear to my heart (Venice, Italy, that is – sorry, all you handsome young weightlifters! Venice, California isn’t our setting today), I should formalize an ongoing feature about the endless stream of books generated by La Serenissima, and how better to start than with the city’s most famous son, Marco Polo?

I recently found (at my beloved Brattle Bookshop, naturally) a battered old copy of Henry Hart’s Venetian Adventurer: The Life and Times of Marco Polo from way back in the 1940s. I snatched it up, paid my pittance, brought it back to Hyde Cottage, and there patiently restored its dust jacket so that it could withstand many more decades. And then I sank into Hart’s big book (starting with his inscription to its original owner) and immediately started loving it, not least because he’s not two paragraphs in before he’s offering some entirely justified praise of Sir Henry Yule’s massive 2-volume annotated 1921 The Book of Ser Marco Polo, which Hart calls “one of the finest pieces of English research scholarship ever produced.”

He then starts his own account with a rolling, enticing opening paragraph:

There set forth from the port of Venice in the year 1253 two brothers, bound for Constantinople on a trading venture. Probably neither of them dreamed that their voyage was to bring them fame, and that through them and the son of one of them European geographical knowledge was to be enriched as never before. That their adventures and those of the young Marco were to be immortalized in one of the most famous books in all literature could not have entered their minds, nor could they have known how far from home destiny was to guide them.

The two brothers were of course Maffeo and Nicolo Polo, daring and prosperous merchants from an era when, as Hart puts it, “Venice, Bride of the Adriatic, was at the zenith of her power.” And they brought along young Marco, who would go on to spend the better part of the next quarter-century in the Far East and in the Mongol Empire of Kublai Khan, then come back, was imprisoned by the Genoese, dictated his famous book full of stories about China, was released, and went on to become a prosperous Venetian merchant himself. He died in 1324, but that book he dictated went on to live for centuries, go through thousands of editions, and recently become one of the gorgeous little hardcovers from Penguin Classics (a first-rate edition by Nigel Cliff).

Hart, author of a row of books on Chinese history and poetry, tells the story of the man behind that famous book, and he does it in such a grand, old-fashioned way that I was swept along on every page despite knowing that story backwards and forwards. Hart anchors his telling of that story on two things: the man and the book. The man, for him, is a quintessential Venetian, and the book – well, Hart is its biggest fan:

The Venetian character has been described as a combination of “cleverness, dissimulation, patience, perseverance, greed for gain, and tenacious energy.” It may be said that Marco possessed all of these to a high degree with the exception of dissimulation, which appears nowhere in his work.

As far as I can recall, Hart is the only writer I’ve ever encountered who believes there’s no dissimulation in The Travels of Marco Polo. But the sheer enthusiasm of his readings of that great book is so winning that I didn’t mind his belief in the honesty of its author. Hart follows his hero along all his travels, recounts his catalogues of birds and plants and peoples and customs encountered, and everywhere does his best to imagine what life was like for the intrepid explorer all those centuries ago:

We of the twentieth century cannot picture to ourselves the terrors and hardships of a journey over the thousands of miles of the central Asian plain, desert, and mountain ranges nearly seven centuries ago. Hunger, thirst, the crossing of snowclad mountain ranges and long stretches of scorching deserts, threats and attacks of banditti and savage tribes, discomforts of every kind – these were some of the physical deterrents from such an adventure. But even more terrible were the superstitions and fears of the unknown, the incredible sensitiveness to tales of strange inhuman monsters and evil spirits which peopled the plains and the mountains. Such travel then involved not only venturing into the regions of an unknown world but conquering deadly fear by means of sublime faith or stubborn courage or both.

Eventually, the famous story winds its way back to our starting point, back to Venice. The Travels of Marco Polo is an intensely Venetian book in its character and its systematic exclusions, in its subtle backdoor egotisms and its omnivorous curiosities, and in the incremental grandiosity of its design; a Roman or a Florentine of the 13th century might have written an account similar in scope or detail, but only a Venetian could have given the thing the key to its immortality: its tone.

And ultimately, the story Hart has to tell ends in Venice as well, at the deathbed of the man who came to be known as “Mr. Millions” (for his endless grab-bag of stories as much as for his personal wealth). Hart writes it rather well:

A priest entered and approached the bed. With gentle touch and low murmuring voice he administered the last rites of Holy Mother Church to the dying man, then silently, with a gesture of benediction, passed out through the door by which he had entered. Before midnight Messer Marco Polo the Venetian had fared forth on his last great journey, the longest and the most adventurous of them all, and he was not coming home again to Venice.

There’ve been many dozens of Marco Polo biographies written in the last sixty years, of course; on simple documentary grounds, Hart’s book has been as thoroughly superseded as his own exceeded the documentary reach of Sir Henry Yule’s big book. But documentary evidence can only take you so far – you also want your biographer to understand the heart of the subject, and that’s why Marco Polo: Venetian Adventurer is my favorite life of Marco Polo – and, by inevitable extension, a wonderful look at a now-vanished Venice.