Monitoring the Brunelleschi’s Dome through latent variable models

Brunelleschi’s Dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, in Florence (IT), is one of the most famous symbols of the Reinassance in theWorld. Monitoring its stability and detecting any atypical behavior is a priority in protecting this important monument. The first cracks in the Dome appeared at the end of the 15th century, and nowadays, they are present in all the Dome’s webs, although with a heterogeneous distribution. A monitoring system has been installed in the Dome since 1955 to monitor the behavior of the cracks; today, it counts more than 160 instruments, such as mechanical and electronic deformometers, thermometers, piezometers. The analyses carried out to date show slight increases in the size of the main cracks and, at the same time, a clear relationship with some environmental variables. However, due to the extension of the monitoring system and the complexity of collected data, an analysis that involves all the variables detected has never been presented in any of the studies conducted in the past. We aim to formulate and estimate a latent variable model to find out simplified structures (i.e., latent common factors) that summarize the measurements coming from the different instruments and explain the overall behavior of the Dome across time.