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History is not made only of popes, emperors, and great battles. It is also written in street fights, court records, everyday gestures, and even in the outline of a knife sketched in the margin of a legal document. Signs and Stories: Scenes from a Restless Rome between the Seventeenth and Nineteenth Centuries, on view in the Bastion of San Marco at Castel Sant'Angelo, brings this hidden face of the Eternal City to light. The exhibition brings together rare documents from the State Archives of Rome with a remarkable collection of historic knives, reconstructing more than two centuries of daily life in Papal Rome. Court records, public edicts, and judicial files recount stories of violence, honor, transgression, and conflict, while the knives on display give tangible form to the very objects described in these archival documents. Castel Sant'Angelo is more than the exhibition's setting, it is one of its protagonists. Its historic prisons once held many figures like those encountered throughout the exhibition, including the notorious bandit Antonio Gasbarrone. More than an exhibition about weapons, Signs and Stories is a journey into the lives of ordinary people, where archives, objects, and memory come together to reveal a restless Rome, far removed from its celebrated monuments yet strikingly close to the passions, fears, and conflicts that continue to shape human experience.