Italy

Italy enters Marco Polo’s story first as the destination chosen for an orphan rescued from earthquake rubble, and later as the place to which he is sent after wartime imprisonment. It gives him a name, an upbringing, and professional training, but his later return is reluctant: the country functions as a point of refuge and work rather than a lasting home.

Rescue and upbringing

A group of Italian priests travelled from village to village with a mobile eye clinic, using two ambulances marked with the Red Cross. When they heard of an earthquake, they searched the wreckage and found a living European baby near the bodies of his parents. They took the child back to Italy and raised him in their orphanage.

The priests named him Marco Polo, linking his life to travel: he had been born, found, and brought to Italy in different places. The rescue thus became not only a change of country but a new identity. The priests aimed to prepare the orphans in their care to support themselves as adults, and sent Marco Polo to an institute for hotel administration.

Training and vocation

Italy’s hotel industry provides the professional model behind Marco Polo’s education. The account contrasts the seriousness with which Italians and Swiss approached hospitality with the limited advancement of the English hotel trade, including in Calcutta, where many hotels and confectioners were run by continental Europeans. Marco Polo’s training was therefore directed toward work in an international industry, not simply toward a local occupation.

That education helps explain how he could move between hotel jobs in different places. Italy gives him the specialized preparation that underpins his career, even though the story does not present him as settling there permanently after his training.

Wartime return

During the war, Marco Polo’s Italian connection drew the police’s attention. He was arrested and remained in prison until the last day of the war. When the war ended, he went directly to Italy, but did so unwillingly.

In Italy he kept himself afloat with small jobs on the Riviera. He later accepted a well-paid hotel position in Rangoon, where the lack of qualified candidates worked in his favour, but the move did not amount to a settled return to hotel life there: after working for a time, he began looking for another job.

Narrative significance

Italy marks two decisive passages in Marco Polo’s life: his transformation from an orphan into a person with a name and a vocation, and his postwar return after imprisonment. The first passage is an act of rescue and preparation; the second is imposed by wartime circumstances and received without enthusiasm. Together they make Italy both the source of his professional formation and an unsettled place of return.