Vulnerability Evaluation and Retrofitting of Existing Building Heritage: an Italian Research Programme

The chapter presents a review of two important national research programmes which received relevant financial support from the Italian Department of civil protection. The first has been devoted to the new definition of the seismic danger over the Italian territory. The research provider has been the National Institute of geophysics and volcanology which involved many university units. The work has been concluded with the delivery of a specific data base containing the map of seismic danger derived from an analytical continuous model, so to allow the definition site by site of the response spectra for a set of return periods. The second research programme refers to the vulnerability evaluation and retrofitting of the existing building heritage and its results should be used to address the national policy of interventions for the upgrading of seismic capacity of constructions. The research provider is the Network of university laboratories of seismic engineering which involves again many university units. The work is in progress and the chapter presents its main objectives. In particular for the research line on precast constructions, which is coordinated by the author, the work can take profit of the results of some previous European projects, adding to them the investigation of some key aspects such as the seismic behaviour of the principal types of connections.