In 1298, Rustichello of Pisa is living his fourteenth year as a hostage of the war with the Genoese. This old, tired court clerk once copied manuscripts for the greatest royal houses of Europe, but no monarch seems ready to pay his ransom. His fate changes when a new prisoner comes to share his cell. It's Marco Polo, the Venetian traveler who reached the far corners of the Orient. Rustichello soon guesses the treasure he has at hand, and so starts a secret and grandiose epic poem: summing up, starting with the accounts of Marco Polo, a work that will draw him the favor of the Christian princes, the book of the marvels of the world. This novel is the recreation of a fascinating epoch of humanity, that of discoveries and the lure of the unknown, which transcends the historical framework to turn his dazzling writing into an act of freedom, transforming the closed space of the dungeon into an arch into which the real world and the domain of dreams are contained.