Damage assessment in one-nave churches and analysis of the most recurring mechanisms after the 2016-2017 Central Italy earthquakes

Abstract The assessment of churches at a territorial scale is a suitable tool to have an overview of the seismic behaviour of this peculiar structural typology and to evaluate the current state of vulnerability based on empirical data. Fragility and vulnerability curves can also be obtained to perform the analysis of different seismic scenarios.The paper presents a detailed typological analysis of 633 one-nave churches, as a selected subset of the database previously examined by the authors, with the aim of evaluating the influence of some parameters such as: the masonry typology, the church dimensions, the presence of the bell tower, on the church vulnerability. After that, a specific analysis is carried out to assess the influence played by single mechanisms on the definition of the overall damage index, with the focus of providing qualitative evaluations and explicit vulnerability and fragility curves related to a selection of significant collapse mechanisms.