Severo_, as is also his sister-in-law Fiordelisa, and the document contains no reference to S. Giovanni. On the whole therefore it seems probable that the Palazzo in the latter parish was purchased by the Travellers after their return from the East.[1] [Illustration: Corte del Milione, Venice.] [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 VIAGGIÒ LE PIÙ LONTANE REGIONI DELL’ASIA E LE DESCRISSE PER DECRETO DEL COMUNE MDCCCLXXXI].