The role of Structural Health Monitoring in the seismic protection of monumental structures: the virtual lab of the Sanctuary of Vicoforte

Novel approaches to the seismic protection of historical masonry domes need to be conceived, tailored and validated on virtual models that accurately reproduce their dynamic behaviour, this requiring numerous, detailed and reliable information about the structure under analysis. The wide range of structural investigations and monitoring activities, conducted over the last decades, makes the model of the Sanctuary of Vicoforte an ideal benchmark structure. Indeed, with its impressive masonry oval dome, the Sanctuary has been the object of historical, geomet-ric, geotechnical and other multi-disciplinary investigations. After introducing the reference model, the different steps of data assimilation are presented. In fact, the calibrated model of the Sanctuary is the result of several updating; the most recent one is a multiphyshic model updating able to take into account, in the final model, different types of data from both static and dynamic monitoring systems. Finally the paper shows how the calibrated model can be used both in diagnostics, reproducing and recognizing different dynamic features associated with damage, and in the optimization of innovative retrofitting interventions. In particular, seismic retrofitting solutions in Kevlar ca-bles were analyzed by using the updated numerical model of the Sanctuary.