Simplified Assessment of the Seismic Vulnerability of Churches After the 2009 L’Aquila Earthquake

The Italian cultural heritage is made of a large number of valuable historical masonry constructions characterized by several chronological, typological, constructive and structural peculiarities. Old masonry churches surely are the most important asset of this heritage. Lessons learnt from past earthquakes emphasize the necessity to establish effective methodologies for the seismic vulnerability assessment at large scale and for defining possible risk mitigation strategies. Based on this premise, this paper aims at calibrating a procedure for assessing a vulnerability index of churches. This procedure is based on the damage provoked by the 2009 L’Aquila Earthquake, with particular reference to three nave churches located in Sulmona-Valva and L’Aquila Dioceses in Abruzzi. In a first step, the damage scenario provoked by the considered event is presented in terms of Damage Probability Matrices. Then, a procedure for assessing the expected damage is properly calibrated in order to reproduce the real damage scenarios observed on the churches under investigation. After its calibration, the model is applied to define suitable fragility curves.