Where did Marco Polo come from?

Croatia.
Marco Polo (or Mark Chicken, in English) was born Marko Pilí c in Korcula, Dalmatia, in 1254, then a
protectorate of Venice.
We shall probably never know whether he really went to the Far East as a seventeen-year-old with his
merchant uncles or if he simply recorded the tales of Silk Road traders who stopped off at their Black
Sea trading post.
What is certain is that his famous book of travels was largely the work of a romance writer called
Rustichello da Pisa, with whom he shared a cell after being captured by the Genoans in 1296. Polo
dictated it; Rustichello wrote it in French, a language Polo didn’t speak.
The result, which appeared in 1306, was designed to entertain, and it became a best seller in the era
before printing. As an accurate history its status is less secure.

Its original title was Il Milione (the million) for reasons that are now obscure, although it quickly became
nicknamed “the million lies,” and Polo—now a rich and successful merchant—was known as “Mr
Million.” It was probably just a catchy thirteenth-century version of a title, like Wonder Book of
Wonders. No original manuscripts survive.
Marco Polo is also supposed to have brought pasta and ice cream to Italy.
In fact, pasta was known in Arab countries in the ninth century and dried macaroni is mentioned in
Genoa in 1279, twenty-five years before Polo claimed to have returned. According to the food historian
Alan Davidson, the myth itself only dates back as far as 1929, when it was mentioned in an American
pasta-trade journal.
Ice cream may well be a Chinese invention, but it seems unlikely to have been introduced to the West by
Polo, as it doesn’t get mentioned again until the middle of the seventeenth century.