After Marco Polo, the roads to the East were travelled by many Italians, but they closed gradually as hostile rulers took over. This paper summarizes much of what can be found in commercial and legal sources: A Florentine description of the three routes to the East: through the Red Sea, Persia, and the northern steppes; the Genoese Vivaldi brothers, who attempted to circumnavigate Africe and did not return; another Vivaldi, who died in India, and the complications of his estate; a Venetian party which went to India and returned with pearls, as revealed in the lawsuit when they returned, and the route they took, from Astrakhan through Afghanistan; the fifteenth-century Genoese who fell sick on his way to the East, and the trouble he got in for going to Tabriz; and the massacre which closed Persia to the Italians for good.