In the course of the years it has undergone many changes, and for a long time has belonged to the Sforza-Cesarini.
Nothing is known of Rodrigo's private life during the pontificate of the four popes who followed Calixtus--Pius II, Paul II, Sixtus IV, and Innocent VIII--for the records of that period are very incomplete.
Insatiable sensuality ruled this Borgia, a man of unusual beauty and strength, until his last years.

Never was he able to cast out this demon.

He angered Pius II by his excesses, and the first ray of light thrown upon Rodrigo's private life is an admonitory letter written by that pope, the eleventh of June, 1460, from the baths of Petriolo.
Borgia was then twenty-nine years old.

He was in beautiful and captivating Siena, where Piccolomini had passed his unholy youth.

There he had arranged a bacchanalian orgy of which the Pope's letter gives a picture.
DEAR SON: We have learned that your Worthiness, forgetful of the high office with which you are invested, was present from the seventeenth to the twenty-second hour, four days ago, in the gardens of John de Bichis, where there were several women of Siena, women wholly given over to worldly vanities.