Seismic Analysis of Historic Masonry Buildings: The Vicarious Palace in Pescia (Italy)

Recent Italian earthquakes have underlined the need for wide monitoring and safety assessment of architectonical heritage. This has emerged also from requirements of the new Italian Technical Recommendations for buildings. Within this subject the paper investigates the seismic vulnerability of a specific monumental masonry building: the Vicarious Palace (Palazzo del Vicario) in Pescia, a small town near Florence. The structural behavior of the Palace was investigated using a finite element model in which the non-linearities of the masonry were considered by proper constitutive assumptions. The seismic behavior was evaluated by the pushover method, according to the Italian Technical Recommendations. The results were compared with the ones obtained by a simplified approach based on the kinematic theorem of limit analysis. Comparisons of the expected seismic demand vs the seismic capacity of the Palace confirm the weakness of this type of building to suffer extensive damage under earthquakes, as frequently observed in similar construction typologies. Additionally, the comprehension of the structural behavior under seismic loading allows the identification of a proper retrofitting strategy.