Li Anni Maravigliosi(1) is a set of works by William Gamble following the travels of Marco Polo, his father and uncle, from 1271, when they left Venice, to 1295, when they returned.

Li Anni Maravigliosi (Novel)
An experimental novel tells the story of a Venetian woman living in the US Midwest and later Texas who is arrested for a crime committed in California decades before. Her story presents a geographically mirror image of the original travels, while incorporating Lingua franca fragments of existing languages (various Romance languages as well as medieval Tuscan and Franco-Venetian) as well as a lingua ignota, to bring the Marco Polo story alive.

Li Anni Maravigliosi: flora|fauna (Art Songs)
A song cycle about animals and botany scored for keyboard, double bass and soprano. The overarching theme is about journeys, and how great explorers (including artists) worry less about making a mark than putting one foot in front of the other in the service of their vision. The work as recorded abstractly follows the Travels, and combines Jazz and Early Music tonalities with some of the progressive linguistic methods in the other two works. The work has already been performed with narration about the Marco Polo Book in Saint Paul (USA) and Venice (IT).

Li Anni Maravigliosi: The Musical! (Multimedia) Uses text from recently discovered, never-published monographs and other scholarship to depict in four musical sections the round trip voyage of Marco Polo and some of the marvels he saw and experienced. Musical improvisational collaboration with Pilar Almalé. The text from this work is also expanded in a multimedia novella format, with art by Pilar Almalé.

A note on Sources
While writing these works, Bill Gamble conducted in-depth studies of the travels of Marco Polo and the culture of both thirteenth-century Venice and the Mongols. Gamble’s work was also greatly influenced by the discoveries of the anonymous “Professor K”(2)  as well as a 19th century librarian from Innsbruck, Emilia-Theresien Inshaltschammer-Schmidt. In 1823, Emilia went to Italy and visited the Biblioteca di Ventimiglia. Within the next year, Emilia had begun a monograph about Kublai Khan and Marco Polo, based on papers consisting of Book fragments and commentaries she found in a back storage room at the Biblioteca. This work, in turn, languished in a different back room (the Bergamo library?) until 2001 when Bill Gamble discovered the fragments and turned his attention to the matter. Emilia’s manuscript is a fascinating amalgam of language that either represents a lingua franca, as she claimed she discovered in the “original” Ventimigliese texts, or her own note-taking fictition. Chi sa? There’s even a section of her work that contains an undecipherable language she claims she discovered on her two- year honeymoon slash research trip along the Silk Road and in Mongolia. Unsurprisingly, the language fragments caught the attention of a tenured professor on lengthy sabbatical from a college in New England. He has since begun to research this language intensively and has published his research and field updates on his website arketis.com. Emilia’s monograph and Professor K’s research were vital to the creation and development of Li Anni Maravigliosi. Other urtextual research includes L’Ottima, the earliest known version of The Book in Italian (Italian National Library Florence), the version in Franco-Venetian (the Geographic Text) No. 1116 (Bibliotèque Nationale), and a vulgate Latin text also in the Bibliotèque Nationale, Paris, Level Three. 

1) Title in Medieval Tuscan
2) For more, please go to www.arketis.com