Seismic response analysis of a historical urban nucleus in Garfagnana.

The Garfagnana region was repeatedly struck by destructive earthquakes up until quite re-cently (1920). The morphological features and the geotechnical soil properties are favourable for seismic response amplification effects, but the consequences of these physical phenomena are generally disregarded in large-scale risk analyses and also by the Italian Seismic Build-ing Code. In the last twenty years, site effects have been the subject of extensive research by the scientific community, but only recently, in order to quantify these site effects in the most important historical urban nucleus of this re-gion, Castelnuovo Garfagnana, a specific re-search, including seismic analyses and ge-otechnical in situ and in laboratory tests, was carried out. The results, in terms of response spectra, compared to those proposed by the Eurocode 8 and by the Italian Seismic Building Code, are described in this paper.