That this could and did occur is made abundantly clear in a decree of the town council of Siena, dated 5 October 1460, stating that "any member of the court of our Lord Pope Pius II of Siena who wishes so ...
In 1493, however, the map that Pope Pius II had given to Pienza three decades earlier was specifically identified as a Cosmographiam Ptolemei--a Ptolemaic map of the world.
..." (87) Edgerton went on to point out that "the ideas that underlay the new cartography were also applicable to the art of Renaissance Florence." This fundamental change in the way in which our world was conceived and perceived was according to Edgerton, "to have profound effect upon the way painters and architects composed the spaces and masses that gave Renaissance style to their pictures and buildings." Gridded with lines of latitude and longitude, the Ptolemaic map of the world ordered by Pope Pius II for Pienza in 1463 allowed the town's residents to visualize themselves spatially, no longer occupying an isolated position but now as part of a geographic whole.
* Construction (?) of grist mill in the Orcia Valley provided for in the will of Pope Pius II.
In Siena, the ancestral home of the Piccolomini, Pope Pius II gave financial encouragement to his sister Caterina in the construction of the Palazzo della Papesse and to his nephews in the building of the Palazzo Todeschini Piccolomini together with its piazza and free-standing Piccolomini family loggia.
Nevertheless, despite, their preference for the urbanity of Siena, the Piccolomini (even, if often, in absentia) remained the dominant force in Pienza up until the middle of the twentieth century and, in a sense, still are through the architectural legacy bequeathed his native town by Pope Pius II Piccolomini.
On the arrival of Pope Pius II in Mantua for the Congress of 1459, among those waiting outside the Cathedral to greet him, strategically positioned on a specially constructed platform, were Barbara of Brandenburg, wife of Lodovico Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, and Bianca Maria Visconti, wife of Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan, the latter accompanied by her children, including the thirteen-year-old Ippolita Sforza, and a retinue of "noble girls and women" (nobili fanciulle e gentildonne).
In late April 1459, extensive festivities were organized for Pope Pius II and members of his court on their way to the Congress of Mantua, and for members of the Italian nobility visiting Florence in connection with the Pope's passage.