ABSTRACT
The Description of the World is always credited to Marco Polo; no other name appears on any title page, so at first glance there is no way of knowing that it was actually ghost written by a popular romance writer of the time. One of Marco Polo's earliest publishers and fans, Giovanni Battista Ramusio, who died in 1557, suggested that Marco Polo was an impressive raconteur. Both Messer Rustichello and Marco Polo describe their captivity in a 'dungeon' but the French medieval historian Jacques Heers suggested that Marco Polo, along with other Venetian prisoners 'of rank', was perhaps held under a form of house arrest in a Genoese family home. In the case of the Polo manuscripts, there are the added problems of the translation from one language to another and of unfamiliar foreign names. The number of texts, however, presents one of the most vexing aspects of Marco Polo's account of the world and his travels.
