I segni e le storie – Scene di una Roma inquieta tra Seicento e Ottocento (Signs and Stories – Scenes of a Restless Rome between the 17th and 19th Centuries)

The exhibition I segni e le storie – Scene di una Roma inquieta tra Seicento e Ottocento (Signs and Stories – Scenes of a Restless Rome between the 17th and 19th Centuries) open to the public in the Bastion of San Marco in Castel Sant'Angelo - a space included in the monument's tour - presents a significant collection of documents from the State Archives of Rome, identified by Franco Russo during his research, along with a selection of historic knives from his collection, within the context of the Castle's collections and history. The court documents, proclamations, minutes, and judicial records, dated between 1611 and 1865, tell us about current events, conflicts, and everyday life, often accompanied by knife outlines drawn in the margins of the testimonies. These traces, in dialogue with the exhibits, give substance and substance to stories preserved for centuries in the archives.

The exhibition thus allows us to observe the evolution of the Roman knife, the traditional “serratore”, which, despite adaptations and transformations, retains the characteristics already documented in seventeenth-century sources up until the unification of Italy. At the same time, research conducted on documents from the State Archives of Rome provides a glimpse into daily life in papal Rome: court records reveal the story of the streets, with its tensions, conflicts, and episodes of oppression; proclamations reveal the perspective of the authorities. Ordinary lives, questions of honor, episodes of violence, transgressions, and needs thus compose a choral narrative of popular Rome, revealing the less official but more authentic face of the city and offering a close-up look at the daily life of the population, often absent from great historical narratives.

The history of the Castle is therefore closely linked to the exhibition: many individuals similar to those described in the documents were imprisoned in its prisons. Among the figures featured throughout the exhibition is the bandit Antonio Gasbarrone, a symbolic leader in an era of tension and contradiction, remembered by the original door of a Castle cell - restored for the occasion - and by the engravings of Bartolomeo Pinelli, one of the most significant interpreters of 19th-century Rome.

Sealing this connection between place and story, a dagger from the Castel Sant’Angelo collections is added to the exhibits, creating an ideal connection with Panopliae, the exhibition held in the Upper Armoury: while the latter recounts the weapons associated with war and courts, Signs and Stories explores the everyday dimension of conflict. These two complementary journeys find in Castel Sant’Angelo the ideal context for reflecting on the relationship between violence, social control, and civil coexistence.

Archival sources remain at the heart of the exhibition project: thanks to the collaboration between Castel Sant'Angelo and the State Archives of Rome, legislative and procedural documents are tools for understanding the complexity of Roman society between the modern and contemporary ages, well beyond their administrative function. The exhibition thus becomes an invitation to read between the lines of history, rediscovering, within the folds of archival memory, the complexity of a city and its varied humanity.

Photo: official poster of the exhibition