Garisenda Tower in Bologna (Italy): structural assessment and numerical simulation

The Garisenda Tower in Bologna is a city symbol and one of the most valuable medieval heritages. The tower was built on compressible soils and suffered from the very beginning for increasing tilting. For this reason, Dante Alighieri refers to the tower to describe the fear caused by the giant Antaeus bending over him when he tries to descend from the eighth to the ninth circle of hell, in the Divina Commedia. Consequently, the tower has always deserved special attentions to preserve its structural safety. The paper describes some of the most recent results obtained from non-destructive monitoring techniques and presents a finite element model suitable to represent the structural behaviour of the tower, included the effect of thermal deformation.