Silk Road tracks the economic intrigues between continents as they occur
sometimes obliquely in the everyday life of Marco Polo's wife, Donata
Badoer Polo. In daily activities such as marketing, her imaginative
interventions disclose a global and personal economics. Donata's
reveries arise in the breach between her home in Venice, Italy, and
Marco's travels in Suzhou, China, prompting her to apprehend the ways
eastern and western hemispheres coincide and collide, the ways the
spice, silk, and jewel trades have resulted in the financing of warfare
and slavery, such apprehension affecting also her intimacy with her
husband. She perceives as well how the construction of stories, such as
those Marco tells, carry a power that affects the interchanges between
these newly intertwined worlds of East and West. Though Donata Polo
lives during the middle ages, she thinks as a kind of global citizen,
albeit staying at home. Donata exists in the vivid divide between
regions at odds, even as her meditations find a geopolitical brace of
camaraderie. She lived an unrecorded life in medieval Venice with her
husband Marco and their three daughters, Fantina, Bellela, and Moreta.
While a plethora of material by and about Marco is available, very
little about Donata exists. Silk Road is written in the voice of a
figure who, effaced by history, compels the act of reimagining.
