Well, the short answer is, no.

Marco Polo had about as much to do with discovering spaghetti as that fat white-bearded bloke who crops up in supermarkets around September, has to do with Christmas. The real reason Santa claws in so much of your hard-earned gold every year is courtesy of a Coca-Cola Corp marketing campaign. And the very same thing goes for the myth of Marco, except in his case it was the Canadian Spaghetti Company who was irresponsibly responsible. It was just another corporate marketing scam that everyone fell for, including more than just a few Italians.

But in a curious kind of way, the Canadian Spaghetti Co got me thinking about ol’ Marco and, ironically, how spookily close to the truth they may have actually been. You see, by the time the venerable Venetian slipped off down the Silk Road, around 1275, spaghetti was already pretty well embedded in southern Italian culinary culture. The Sicilians had even established a lucrative export market for it long before it was taken seriously in the slow-on-the-uptake north.

With a weird twist of fate, the chronology suggests that by the time Marco Polo had loaded up his Gondola and set sail for the Far East, he just missed the spaghetti revolution that was twirling its way northwards at the very same time. Possibly by months, or even weeks. He would have eaten lagana for sure, but arguably, not spaghetti.

So, imagine this. Along the way he would’ve sampled all kinds of strange new foods and tasted unimaginable, faraway flavours. And, with exotically alien people too. From Murgh with Moguls, to Mutton with Mongols, along with a spectacularly diarrhetic dose of Delhi Belly and the Tibetan Trots to boot.

As far as freaky food with freaky people was concerned, by the time Marco Polo had rocked up on the other side of that rather long wall, he probably thought he’d already ‘Been there, done that and, got the Freaky Food T Shirt’.

But this is where it gets interesting, because for all the madness that had passed through his system up to this point, he was probably yet to come across anything like pasta. Plenty of rice, no doubt, but pasta? So I picture him, chillin’ with Kublai Khan and his mandarin mutton munchers, getting monged out in a seedy back-street opium den in downtown Shanghai one night. Suddenly, they’re overcome with an immediate hit of the midnight munchies. So Kublai Khan himself gets on the metaphorical ‘dog and bone’ to the local Chinese takeaway and orders up a set meal for four,,, each.

Pretty soon the Deliveroo rickshaw rocks up out front and, in amongst the dim-sum and dumplings, whacked out Marco discovers,,,, noodles! Just like that flat stuff back home, but cut into thin strands, like laces. And apart from all that trippy slop they came in, they kind of tasted the same too.

Twenty four years poor old Marco had been away from his beloved rat and syphilis infested Venice, twenty four years of rotten meat, crap wine, short whores and a touch too much of Afghanistan’s greatest export. He would have arrived back in La Serenissima, strung out, yet full of epic tales of dynastic lands and distant discoveries to be shared with his fellow Venexiani. And, noodles.

It’s at this point that it all just kind of falls apart for the poor old bugger. Excitedly, he would have pulled a handful of dehydrated noodles from his designer rucksack and proclaimed to all around, “Look, look what I discovered in the East, I’m going to call it,,, Strands!” By this time of course, the Venetians were already chowing down on Sicily’s finest. Not only that, but they’d even come up with their own version, Bigoli, thicker and fatter than Sicilian spaghetti, a bit like those Chinese Strand things. FFS!

So maybe, just maybe, in a messed up and badly timed kind of way,,,, dare I say it? No, he was just unlucky that’s all. He missed it just as he left and it was already here by the time he got back. You’ve really gotta feel for him.