23.  We have seen that Ramusio places the scene of the story recently alluded to at the mansion in the parish of S. Giovanni Grisostomo, the court of which was known in his time as the Corte del Millioni; and indeed he speaks of the Travellers as at once on their arrival resorting to that mansion as their family residence.  Ramusio’s details have so often proved erroneous that I should not be surprised if this also should be a mistake.  At least we find (so far as I can learn) no previous intimation that the family were connected with that locality.  The grandfather Andrea is styled of San Felice.  The will of Maffeo Polo the younger, made in 1300, which we shall give hereafter in abstract, appears to be the first document that connects the family with S. Giovanni Grisostomo.  It indeed styles the testator’s father “the late Nicolo Paulo of the confine of St. John Chrysostom,” but that only shows what is not disputed, that the Travellers after their return from the East settled in this locality.  And the same will appears to indicate a surviving connexion with S. Felice, for the priests and clerks who drew it up and witness it are all of the church of S. Felice, and it is to the parson of S. Felice and his successor that Maffeo bequeaths an annuity to procure their prayers for the souls of his father, his mother, and himself, through after the successor the annuity is to pass on the same condition to the senior priest of S. Giovanni Grisostomo.  Marco Polo the Elder is in his will described as of S.  Severo, as is also his sister-in-law Fiordelisa, and the document contains no reference to S. Giovanni.  On the whole therefore it seems probable that the Palazzo in the latter parish was purchased by the Travellers after their return from the East.[1]

[Sidenote:  Relic of the Casa Polo in the Corte Sabbionera.]

24.  The Court which was known in the 16th century as the Corte del Millioni has been generally understood to be that now known as the Corte Sabbionera, and here is still pointed out a relic of Marco Polo’s mansion. [Indeed it is called now (1899) Corte del Milione; see p. 30.—­H.  C.]

M. Pauthier’s edition is embellished with a good engraving which purports to represent the House of Marco Polo.  But he has been misled.  His engraving in fact exhibits, at least as the prominent feature, an embellished representation of a small house which exists on the west side of the Sabbionera, and which had at one time perhaps that pointed style of architecture which his engraving shows, though its present decoration is paltry and unreal.  But it is on the north side of the Court, and on the foundations now occupied by the Malibran theatre, that Venetian tradition and the investigations of Venetian antiquaries concur in indicating the site of the Casa Polo.  At the end of the 16th century a great fire destroyed the Palazzo,[2] and under the description of “an old mansion ruined from the foundation” it passed into the hands of one Stefano Vecchia, who sold it in 1678 to Giovanni Carlo Grimani.  He built on the site of the ruins a theatre which was in its day one of the largest in Italy, and was called the Theatre of S. Giovanni Grisostomo; afterwards the Teatro Emeronitio.  When modernized in our own day the proprietors gave it the name of Malibran, in honour of that famous singer, and this it still bears.[3]