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The reuse of ancient ceramic fragments in Romanesque masonries was a common practice\ud in the Medieval era. A cultural impoverishment of the masonry building art characterized\ud this period. Pre-existing structures were often exploited to build new masonries, both for\ud civil and religious purpose. Starting from these general considerations, a specific construction\ud technique of some Romanesque masonries of the Church of S. Maria in Portuno (Italy)\ud and made by tile and brick fragments, was studied by a multidisciplinary approach. Analyses\ud of the chemical, physical, and mechanical properties of the original materials (tile and brick\ud fragments, mortars) were carried out by laboratory tests. Furthermore, some wall specimens\ud were reproduced through the same ceramic materials and construction technique of\ud the original masonries. Compression tests were carried out on these wall specimens so as\ud to understand the influence of this construction technique on their compressive strength,\ud Young’s modulus, and failure mode. The results allowed increased current knowledge on\ud historical materials and on the mechanical behavior of these specific historical masonries.\ud Useful data obtained by experimental characterization of the materials and walls will also\ud allow to guide future restoration works on these masonries

The damage behaviour of unfired dry earth is determined experimentally under compression by means of loading-unloading cyclic tests. The scalar damage parameter is determined and its evolution law is related to the applied strain -d ( ). Interpolating functions are determined, permitting to estimate how the damage depends on the deformation process of the considered material. Different aspect-ratios of the specimens are considered.

Urban seismic networks are considered very useful tools for the management of seismic emergencies. In this work, a study of the first urban seismic network in central Italy is presented. The urban seismic network, built using MEMS sensors, was implemented in the urban district of Camerino, one of the cities in central Italy with the greatest seismic vulnerability. The technological choices adopted in developing this system as well as the implemented algorithms are shown in the context of their application to the first seismic event recorded by this innovative monitoring infrastructure. This monitoring network is innovative because it implements a distributed computing and statistical earthquake detection algorithm. As such, it is not based on the traces received by the stations from the central server; rather, each station carries out the necessary checks on the signal in real time, sending brief reports to the server in case of anomalies. This approach attempts to shorten the time between event detection and alert, effectively removing the dead times in the systems currently used in the Italian national network. The only limit for an instant alarm is the latency in the tcp/ip packages used to send the short reports to the server. The presented work shows the infrastructure created; however, there is not enough data to draw conclusions on this new early warning approach in the field, as it is currently in the data collection phase.