Effectiveness of seismic improvement of monumental heritage

New guidelines for seismic improvement interventions on monuments and heritage buildings were issued in Italy in 2011. Such guidelines are characterized by the introduction of a procedure for evaluating the effects of interventions in terms of the resulting increase of nominal life of the structure. The procedure makes reference to the description of the state of the structure in terms of damage mechanisms. In the work proposed here, the application of this recent procedure to a particular case is the occasion for a study of its sensitivity to the values of the vulnerability parameters adopted. The case examined concerns a church located on a hill crest in the subalpine region of northern Italy, in a low-to-moderate seismic area. The application of the procedure has permitted remarks on the evaluation both of the vulnerability indices associated to the different damage mechanisms and of the reduction of risk consequent to the interventions.