Structural Monitoring of Historical Constructions: Increasing Knowledge to Minimize Interventions

In all the fields of restoration, from the artistic to the architectural one, the principle of minimum intervention is always mandatory: no work is allowed if not effectively needed for the perpetuation of the cultural heritage to the future generations. Within the architectural restoration interventions, this approach should be applied also to the structural ones, but often this doesn’t happen, in part for safety’s sake, in part for the cultural unpreparedness of some technical designers, who work indistinctively on new and old buildings. Increasing the knowledge and the understanding of the ancient monuments structural behaviour is the only method to decrease the uncertainties and in consequence to minimize the interventions, whose effective necessity has to be proven, in line with the theoretical requests. In step with this, the structural monitoring, with its different approaches, represents an important mean to increase this knowledge, investigating what happened to the structure in the past, understanding its present evolution and also controlling it in the future. The aim of this paper is therefore to inspect the role of structural monitoring in the knowledge and also in the conservation process of the built historical heritage, bearing in mind that knowledge and conservation should always go hand in hand.