Neflix: Marco Polo — wired.com

When Marco Polo himself first set foot on the Silk Road, however, he wasn’t simply crossing a rugged trade route to explore a strange new land. According to Fusco, the intrepid Italian was embarking on a pioneering journey on the world’s first information superhighway. “It was this interchange of cultural, technological and religious information,” says Fusco of the Silk Road. Back in the 13th century, Fusco notes, long before Google (let alone the telegraph), Polo became the earliest bridge between East and West; he was literally the only way Europeans had a clue about what was actually happening in the exotic foreign continent. “Marco was the first global traveler. He was in many ways the world’s first embedded journalist,” says Fusco. And his writings of a progressive, tolerant East shocked the West. “He brought back objective reporting about cultures that were being misrepresented as barbaric. He came back and gave these accounts of China that just seemed too fabulous to comprehend.”

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