L’Aquila’s single nave churches and 2009’s earthquake: knowledge, modeling, intervention

L’Aquila urban history is closely connected with the seismic history of the area in which it is located; this area is crossed by 2 faults and therefore subject to frequent paroxysms. Although the confidence of L'Aquila with earthquakes is ancient, the buildings that populate its historical center are not seismic - resistant, as the events of the 2009 earthquake have witnessed bitterly.In this paper, starting from the analysis of structural and morphological charac-ters of L’Aquila’s architecture, we have investigated on the effects of the earth-quake of April 6th, 2009, caused to some specialist building types: the single nave churches. After acquiring the lessons of the earthquake, we have identified and classified the instability on a significant sample of masonry buildings belonging to the ex-amined typological family. Then we have done, through a kinematic analysis, evaluation of the multipliers of the horizontal actions associated with most fre-quently local failure mechanisms. From these, we have designed a methodology of intervention for the building type studied, focused on improving seismic, which combines the constructive aspects with quick seismic processing. The proposed hypothesis of intervention are oriented towards combination of a significant increase in the security level with the conservation demands of these architectural heritage.