Cultural Heritage and earthquake: The case study of San Francesco’s church in Amandola (Central Italy)

Italy is a high seismic risk country. Since 1900 more than 30 earthquakes with magnitude greater than Mw=5.8 occurred, and the last one is the Central Italy seismic sequence. It heavily hit the regions of Marche, Umbria, and Abruzzo causing many deaths, injuries and extensive damages on the cultural heritage. This paper analyses the church of San Francesco in Amadola, located in the Marche region that has been considered condemned for the severe damages reported after these earthquakes. The church is globally analyzed by the application of nonlinear static analysis on a Finite Element Model where the nonlinearity of masonry is taking into account with a proper constitutive law. The study wants to prove how global analysis combined by the local analysis can reproduce the behavior of this structure during a quake, showing that it can repeat the real damages produced by earthquakes.