Title: Garisenda Tower in Bologna (Italy): structural assessment and numerical simulation

Authors: Angelo Di Tommaso; Gian Carlo Olivetti; Giuseppe Lacidogna; Stefano Invernizzi; Alberto Carpinteri

Addresses: Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna, Via Zamboni 33 – 40126 Bologna, Italy ' Smart Monitoraggio Italia Srl, 20134 Milano, Italy ' Politecnico di Torino, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24 – 10129 Torino, Italy ' Politecnico di Torino, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24 – 10129 Torino, Italy ' Politecnico di Torino, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24 – 10129 Torino, Italy

Abstract: The Garisenda Tower in Bologna is a city symbol and one of the most valuable medieval heritages. The tower was built on compressible soils and suffered from the very beginning for increasing tilting. For this reason, Dante Alighieri refers to the tower to describe the fear caused by the giant Antaeus bending over him when he tries to descend from the eighth to the ninth circle of hell, in the Divina Commedia. Consequently, the tower has always deserved special attentions to preserve its structural safety. The paper describes some of the most recent results obtained from non-destructive monitoring techniques and presents a finite element model suitable to represent the structural behaviour of the tower, included the effect of thermal deformation.

Keywords: cultural heritage; masonry tower; non-destructive techniques monitoring; finite element modelling; structural assessment.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMRI.2024.139556

International Journal of Masonry Research and Innovation, 2024 Vol.9 No.4, pp.372 - 383

Received: 05 Apr 2022
Accepted: 03 Oct 2022
Published online: 04 Jul 2024 *

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