“La Sorbella” is a deep-seated existing landslide in a Miocene clayey formation located in central Italy. Given the interaction with a national road, this landslide has been monitored for a long time with inclinometers and hydraulic piezometers. Recently, the monitoring system was implemented by adding pressure transducers in the Casagrande cells and by equipping the old inclinometers with in-place probes, to allow a remote reading of the instruments and data recording. This system allowed to identify that the very small average rate of movement observed over one year (1.0–1.5 cm/year) is the sum of small single sliding processes, strictly linked to the sequence of rainfall events. Moreover, data recorded by in-place inclinometer probes detected the response of the landslide to the seismic sequence of 2016 occurring in central Italy. Such in situ measurements during earthquakes, indeed rarely available in the scientific literature, allowed an assessment of the critical acceleration of the sliding mass by means of a back-analysis. The possibility to distinguish the difference between seismic and rainfall induced displacements of the slope underlines the potential of continuous monitoring in the diagnosis of landslide mechanisms.

This work originates from the need to provide the geotechnical characterisation of a natural heterogeneous soil outcropping along a landslide-prone hillside. The soil, geologically identified as highly tectonised phyllite, results from the large tectonic strain deformation of the original weak rock, which produced a melange of grain particles enclosed in a fine matrix. This study investigates the possibility of estimating the shear strength using the framework established for binary mixtures to overcome the difficulties of undisturbed sampling. Two main problems were tackled: the identification of the matrix fraction in well-graded mixtures and the effect of variation in the grading of the granular fraction.

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