I find the ongoing discussion fascinating. The question of Il Milione
as an original or a translation, of which is the 'real' Milione and -
if we were to include authorship - of who is/are its author/s is
one of the best riddles I have ever had to play with. Besides, the question of
the 'nationality' of this text is just as complex, especially if we
start looking at its 'fortuna'.
Last summer I gave a paper on Il Milione as a 'traduzione senza originali'
and on its Italian/European/Western World credentials at the
University of Urbino (the publication should be out soon, they
tell me...). One of the interesting things I found was that if
you compare the Trecento version with Ramusio's the word 'Venezia'
(in all its variants) occurs far more often in the second, while 'Italia'
'italiano', etc., which are not to be found at all in the Trecento
Tuscan text are mentioned 7 times in Ramusio's....
I did not count the occurrences manually, of course. I used the
CD-ROM Letteratura Italiana Zanichelli, a cura
di P. Stoppelli e E. Picchi, which includes the following editions: G. B.
Ramusio, I viaggi di Marco Polo, in Navigazioni e viaggi, a cura di M.
Milanesi, vol. III, Torino, Einaudi, 1980; Marco Polo, Il Milione
(versione toscana del ‘300), a cura di V. Bertolucci Pizzorusso,
Milano, Adelphi, 1973. I think if I tried to set up a course on a
text like Il Milione I would at least attempt to get the students to
do some work on these electronic texts (although a greater range
might be even better).
Hope this helps (and I'll be happy to send a copy of my article even
in its yet unpublished form)
Loredana Polezzi
University of Warwick
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