[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]
[In 1881, the year of the Venice International Geographical Congress,
a Tablet was put up on the Theatre with the following inscription: -
QVI FURONO LE CASE
DI
MARCO POLO
CHE VIAGGIO LE PIU LONTANE REGIONI DELL' ASIA
E LE DESCRISSE
PER DECRETO DEL COMUNE
MDCCCLXXXI].
There is still to be seen on the north side of the Court an arched doorway
in Italo-Byzantine style, richly sculptured with scrolls, disks, and
symbolical animals, and on the wall above the doorway is a cross similarly
ornamented.[4] The style and the decorations are those which were usual in
Venice in the 13th century. The arch opens into a passage from which a
similar doorway at the other end, also retaining some scantier relics of
decoration, leads to the entrance of the Malibran Theatre. Over the
archway in the Corte Sabbionera the building rises into a kind of tower.
This, as well as the sculptured arches and cross, Signor Casoni, who gave
a good deal of consideration to the subject, believed to be a relic of the
old Polo House.
