Sun, wine and Croatia

"you know, here is where Marco Polo was born" stated my Croatian friend. For a moment, I felt destabilized by this historical revelation, and also a bit guilty not to have studied enough the life of the Italian traveler in the high school. If so, and not because I am Italian, I would certainly point out that the most of history books claim that he was born in Venice. But also with this annoying fog on my mind, I was almost sure that it sounded weird to me that Marco Polo was born in Korcula, a cheerful Croatian village of an island in the Adriatic Sea.
A compatriot friend and I we gave a perplexed look each other after our buddy from Dubrovnik showed us the alleged entrance of the alleged house of the Venetian traveler, hidden in a small pedestrian street through the medieval centre of the village. Unfortunately, our curiosity was soon mortified by the fact that the house was closed to the public in that period. Giving a look around, by the name of the shops which proudly showed references to Marco Polo and its main work Il Milione, I understood that my friend was not kidding us and the whole town endorsed her same conviction .

It was a warm day of April and the typical Croatian stone houses reflected a shining sun while I walked along with my Italian friend, plus the Croatian and her parents. In the morning, we decided to leave my friend’s hometown Dubrovnik to spend the day on the island. It was her father’s birthday and this should be already an acceptable reason to justify the trip, but my friend and I we are also colleagues in a master in European Journalism that we were attending in Brussels, and we had to work. We were there to interview some wine producers in Korcula’s cellars and vineyards for our video report on Croatian wines, and maybe we would have the chance to taste their delicious products.

While I was enjoying the landscape visible from the town’s harbor and my mind was foretasting the wine that afterwards I would like to drink (maybe a Malvasia? Or a Dingac?), I realized that it was not really important to me if Marco Polo was born in Korcula or not. I was in Croatia, in a cheerful Mediterranean town that soon made me forget, for a while, about any historical inconsistency.