John Fusco Quotes

At a young age, when I was fascinated with China, I read 'The Travels of Marco Polo' and learned about this exciting, dramatic world he captured and reported on. He's so little known, but yet this mythology has survived that's so misrepresentative of his story.

I feel like we are reintroducing historical figures, with the explorer Marco Polo and the grandson of Genghis Khan, Kublai Khan, the ruler of the Mongol empire, the trading place that everybody wanted to get involved in.

I grew up with a fascination with Marco Polo. I had this unlikely interest in the East as a young man, and you can't really read about Chinese history and philosophy without encountering him at every turn.

Marco Polo has been kind of buried under this cloud of rather banal historical dust, when the true story is so much more exciting.

I could do one show after another in China for the rest of my life and still die ignorant. There's a lot of places left to go.

He was an Italian kid traveling in China, and I'm of Italian decent with a fascination for China. So, I always felt this connection to him and lived vicariously through the travels of Marco Polo.

When people hear the name 'Marco Polo,' they tend to think of a map or explorer. Very few people know the true story of Marco Polo, and it's so much more compelling and exciting than the mythology.

It always circled back around to Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. That always fascinated me because so few people make the connection between the two.

Khan let Polo be his eyes and ears. He was the first one to build a bridge between East and West.

You can feel as brave as Columbus starting for the unknown the first time you enter a Chinese lane full of boys laughing at you, or when you risk climbing down in a Tibetan pub for a meal of rotten meat.

I sailed around Europe and lived with the Karen tribe in Thailand for a month.

In 2007, I did a horseback trip across part of central Mongolia with my 13-year-old son - we encountered Marco Polo at all these historical places where Mongolian nomads would reference his accounts and his relationship with Kublai Khan.

I'm a little like Marco Polo, going around and mixing cultures.

I really love travelling to places where I get to learn something new about a new group of people or a new place. Learn some history, contemplate some business ideas, and sort of get off the beaten track a little bit.

We're not just making 'Marco Polo,' we're living it. Because we traveled to Venice... Kazakhstan... into the jungles of Malaysia.

When you go visiting countries, you start reading the history of the place and you start getting into the culture, and then you have to leave. In my experience, all countries have hidden treasures.

I'm a culture vulture, and I just want to experience it all.

The journey of Marco Polo is the hero's journey, one that all cultures across the globe can relate to.

I wanted to know what it would be like to get on a horse and ride all the way west to Europe and take a look back at my own culture through the eyes of a nomad.

Filming in India was very special. The chaos, the noise, and the sensory overload was all really wonderful. It was a new world to me, and being able to capture that was incredible.

In the old days, people used to risk their lives in India or in the Americas in order to bring back products which now seem to us to have been of comically little worth, such as brazilwood and pepper, which added a new range of sense experience to a civilization which had never suspected its own insipidity... From these same lands our modern Marco Polos now bring back the moral spices of which our society feels an increasing need as it is conscious of sinking further into boredom, but that this time they take the form of photographs, books, and travelers tales.

When I live in a country, I always try to learn about the country - not just England, the U.K. as a whole - so I will stay here some days to do something different.

One day, I would like to go over to Spain to play just to see what it's like and to experience that.

At the end of the 18th century, a young British explorer named George Bogle became one of the first Westerners to penetrate the mysterious and reclusive realm of Druk Yul, or 'Dragon Land.'

I love experiencing new cultures and new foods.