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Seismic events that struck Italy in the last years had a dramatic impact on historical and cultural heritage. Damage occurred on existing masonry buildings, in particular on churches, stressed out the need to better understand the seismic behaviour of this type of constructions as well as to define more appropriate mitigation strategies to be applied at large scale. This study deals with a predictive methodology for vulnerability assessment of churches in large territorial areas. Focusing the attention on three naves churches of Abruzzi, the paper proposes modifications and integrations of an existing methodology taken by literature. These modifications are defined through a calibration procedure based on damage observation of 64 three naves churches located at different distances from the epicentre of the 2009 earthquake. The proposed model is employed to predict damage level distribution for different earthquake intensities, allowing fragility curves to be plotted and therefore potential damage scenarios to be represented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both the April 6, 2009 L'Aquila (Italy) earthquake, and the 2010-2011 Canterbury (New Zealand) earthquake sequence provided unprecedented opportunity to enhance the understanding on earthquake performance of infrastructure systems, and to analyse still-opened issues affecting the post-earthquake assessment and management of infrastructure. This paper provides a succinct and holistic overview on the physical and functional performances of the gas, water, waste water, road and electric networks (this one to a limited extent for the L'Aquila case-study), following the moment magnitude (M) 6.3 L'Aquila earthquake, and two main events of the Canterbury earthquake sequence, namely: the M 7.1 September 4, 2010 Darfield and the M 6.2 February 22, 2011 Christchurch earthquakes. A structured format, based on internationally recognised taxonomies and damage descriptors, is introduced to present the assets and to report on the earthquake-induced physical impacts for both above-ground and underground components. Functional impacts, interdependency issues and resilience attributes observed during the emergency management and recovery phases for the same infrastructure systems are furthermore discussed in the paper. It is envisaged that the data and overview on the seismic performance and management of infrastructure systems presented in the paper can be used to test the effectiveness of existing models and to inform the development of new models for seismic risk assessment and resilience analysis. Also, the structured framework presented within this paper can form the basis for defining specific and standardised survey tools for post-earthquake assessment of infrastructure systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]