Seismic assessment of cultural heritage: Nonlinear 3D analyses of “Santa Maria della Carità” in Ascoli Piceno

In this paper a masonry church is analysed in order to assess its seismic vulnerability with respect to the actual state of conservation, including past retrofitting. The case study is the “Santa Maria della Carità” church, located in Ascoli Piceno, a small town of Marche region, in the Centre of Italy, where two major earthquakes occurred in August and in October 2016, causing widespread damage. The church has a large historical, architectural value because is one of the most important example of the Barocco age in the region, and contains a lot of precious paintings of local artists. Moreover it has also a social value for the city of Ascoli Piceno, because it is the only one that is opened to the devotees for every moment of day and night. Stroked also by the L’Aquila earthquakes (2009) the church was subjected to a retrofit intervention (2010), in order to obtain a better “box-like behaviour”. Churches are usually characterised by a high seismic vulnerability due to their structural and geometric configurations, heterogeneous and deteriorated materials. These structures have very large and high external walls without internal orthogonal walls: the space thus created is often covered by some thin vaults or thrusting arches. In this work using an advanced FEM approach (a 3D nonlinear solid numerical model has been used to evaluate the seismic capacity) the structure has been studied to establish its significant deficiencies, in order to obtain a clear understanding of the structural behavior. The results should be useful to design a reliable strengthening intervention, but they could be also extrapolated to the wide variety of historical churches, and generalized for a wide masonry building category.