About the book: 2017 / In the summer of 1444, Enea Silvio Piccolomini, secretary of the office of Emperor Sigismund, at the request of his fellow countryman and old acquaintance of the Siena lawyer Mariano Sozzini, creates a small a Latin work known as "The Tale of Two Lovers." After 14 years, the author of this story, having ascended the throne of St. Peter with the name Pius II, will write in one letter: “Throw away Aeneas, accept Pius” and renounce the erotic writings of his youth. “The Story of Two Lovers,” however, has not stopped being read or translated—not only because of the authorship, which has become scandalous, but also for its own merits. The writer insists that what he described actually happened in Siena; his story is the truth behind a mask. The main character, Euryalus, was already identified in the 18th century with Kaspar Schlick, the head of the imperial chancellery and patron of Piccolomini: the author addresses him with a dedicatory letter, not without guile, asking him to remember if something similar happened to him. With the heroine, Lucrezia, it is more difficult: it was proposed to consider her the wife of Mariano Sozzini, but it is impossible to allow Piccolomini to describe to his addressee the debauchery of his own wife.