A number of Islamic writers and the 13th century Italian Marco Polo describe how this was obtained by sublimation from zinc ores and condensed onto clay or iron bars, archaeological examples of which have been identified at Kush in Iran.

Marco Polo brought some glazes back to Italy in the 13th century.

During the era after the war, later called the Pax Mongolica, adventurous Westerners such as Marco Polo travelled all the way to China and brought the first reports of its wonders to Europe.

Stories of kites were first brought to Europe by Marco Polo towards the end of the 13th century, and kites were brought back by sailors from Japan and Malaysia in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Marco Polo was not the first Westerner to travel to the Orient and return with amazing stories of this different culture, but his accounts published in the late 13th and early 14th centuries were the first to be widely read throughout Europe.

Over a period of thirty years, he visited most of the known Islamic world as well as many non-Muslim lands ; his journeys including trips to North Africa, the Horn of Africa, West Africa, Southern Europe and Eastern Europe in the West, and to the Middle East, South Asia, Central Asia, Southeast Asia and China in the East, a distance surpassing threefold his near-contemporary Marco Polo.

The most famous of these travelers was Marco Polo.

Illegal hunting of very rare species such as the snow leopard and the Marco Polo sheep.

Xanadu ( here called Ciandu, as Marco Polo spelled it ) on the French map of Asia made by Sanson d ' Abbeville, geographer of King Louis XIV, dated 1650.

This quotation was based upon the writings of the Venetian explorer Marco Polo who is widely believed to have visited Xanadu in about 1275.

Marco Polo also described a large portable palace made of gilded and lacquered cane or bamboo, and supported against the wind by two hundred silk cords, which could be taken apart quickly and moved from place to place.

One month after he came into office, Japanese troops clashed with Chinese troops near Peking in the Marco Polo Bridge Incident.

The name Madageiscar was first recorded in the memoirs of 13th-century Venetian explorer Marco Polo as a corrupted form of the name Mogadishu, the Somali port with which Polo had confused the island.

Marco Polo (; ; September 15, 1254 – January 9, 1324 ) was a Venetian merchant traveler whose travels are recorded in Il Milione, a book which did much to introduce Europeans to Central Asia and China.

Marco Polo's other legacies include Venice Marco Polo Airport, the Marco Polo sheep, and several books and films.

One possible place of birth is Venice's former contrada of San Giovanni Crisostomo, which is sometimes presented by historians as the birthplace, and it is generally accepted that Marco Polo was born in the Venetian Republic with most biographers pointing towards Venice itself as Marco Polo's home town.

According to The Travels of Marco Polo, they passed through much of Asia, and met with the Kublai Khan.

In 1271, during the dogado of Doge Lorenzo Tiepolo, Marco Polo ( at seventeen years of age ), his father, and his uncle set off for Asia on the series of adventures that were later documented in Marco's book.

While Polo's book describes paper money and the burning of coal, it fails to mention the Great Wall of China, chopsticks, and footbinding, making skeptics wonder if Marco Polo had really gone to China, or wrote his book based on hearsay.

Marco Polo in his 13th-century travels, for example, describes the Persian race — the current concept of " race " dates back only to the 17th century.

The Travels of Marco Polo, where Polo records his journey along the Silk Road, describes Samarkand as a " a very large and splendid city ..." Here also is related the story of a Christian church in Samarkand, which miraculously remained standing after a portion of its central supporting column was removed.

Despite the extremely unreliable and often fantastical nature of the travels it describes, it was used as a work of reference — Christopher Columbus, for example, was heavily influenced by both this work and Marco Polo's earlier Il Milione ( Adams 53 ).

* Cassie: Cassie describes Marco as cute, but not her type.

" As a spider, Marco is able to see through Erek's hologram, and he describes the foot as " interlocking plates of steel and ivory ," and the foot looks like a dog's paw.

Book One describes the lands of the Middle East and Central Asia that Marco encountered on his way to China.

Caïssa originated in a 658-line poem called " Scacchia, Ludus " published in 1527 by Hieronymus Vida ( Marco Girolamo Vida ), which describes in Latin Virgilian hexameters a chess game between Apollo and Mercury in the presence of the other gods.

Marco describes them as " walking salad shooters " when they are first seen in the first book because of their spikes.

The story follows a boy named Marco, who describes the sights and sounds of imaginary people and vehicles traveling along Mulberry Street in an elaborate fantasy story he dreams up to tell to his father at the end of his walk, but decides instead to simply tell him what he actually saw.

Marco Polo in 14th century describes the Kingdom of Eli in Malabar ( northern Kolathiris ) whose initial settlement was at Karippat in Kurumattur amsom.

There is a legend of Marco Polo importing pasta from China which originated with the Macaroni Journal, published by an association of food industries with the goal of promoting the use of pasta in the United States.

They seem to be fond of eating a native endangered plant, Cordia globosa and feeding on Nickernut ( Caesalpinia ) a primary food plant of the endangered Miami Blue Butterfly ( Cyclargus thomasi bethunebakeri ); additionally on Marco Island, Green Iguanas have been observed using the burrows of the Florida Burrowing Owl, a species of special concern, all of which can make them more of a serious threat to Florida's ecosystem than originally believed.

Initially proposed by Marco Dorigo in 1992 in his PhD thesis, the first algorithm was aiming to search for an optimal path in a graph, based on the behavior of ants seeking a path between their colony and a source of food.

Endorsements are also to be expected from a celebrity chef, such as Ken Hom's range of bestselling woks in Europe, but can also lead to criticism over which endorsements are chosen such as when Marco Pierre White teamed up with Bernard Matthews Farms, or when Darren Simpson advised and endorsed fast food restaurant KFC.

Marco Pierre White became the youngest chef in the world to achieve three Michelin stars, which went on to make him a household name and have one of his cookbooks, White Heat, described in 2005 as " possibly the most influential recipe book of the last 20 years " by food critic Jay Rayner.

The Travels of Marco Polo reports that upon finding the caliph's great stores of treasure which could have been spent on the defense of his realm, Hulagu Khan locked him in his treasure room without food or water, telling him " eat of thy treasure as much as thou wilt, since thou art so fond of it.

In 1260, Marco Polo described Yarkand, part of the area under Kaidu as " five days ' journey in extent "; that its inhabitants were mostly Muslim although there were also some Nestorian and Jacobite Assyrians ; and that it had plenty of food and other necessities, " especially cotton.

A number of ethnomycologists such as R. Gordon Wasson, John Marco Allegro, and Terence McKenna, have suggested that most characteristics of manna are similar to that of Psilocybe cubensis mushrooms, notorious breeding grounds for insects, which decompose rapidly.

Existing Elite members were offered similar membership by The Marco Polo Club.

On 2 September 2006, in a Euro 2008 qualifier against Hungary, Pedersen, whose favourite player as a kid was Marco van Basten, scored a goal which was very similar to van Basten's famous goal in the final of the 1988 European Football Championship.

Niccolò, Marfeo, and Marco Polo made two voyages in 1260 and 1271, and in 1294 the missionary John of Monte Corvino made a similar journey for Pope Nicholas IV.

In 2002, Camoranesi was signed on a co-ownership deal ; initially Juventus agreed a price of € 2, 841, 000 in cash plus player deal ( which Max Vieri was sold for € 517, 000 ( or 1 billion lire ) plus € 2. 324 million cash ( or 4. 5 billion lire cash )) On 26 June 2003, he was signed outright by the Bianconeri on a permanent basis for an additional fee of € 5 million ; this was the same day Juventus signed Marco Di Vaio in similar deal.

Later, Marco Polo spoke of a similar race located in the Bay of Bengal.

The new great glass covered hall — the Sala Marco Aurelio — created by covering the Giardino Romano is similar to the one used for the Sala Ottagonale and British Museum Great Court.