Sassi di Matera represent one of the best preserved rupestrian settlements and the oldest town in the world. It is UNESCO site since 1992 thanks to its cultural history and its harmonious development within its ecosystem. Sassi are completely built with a soft granular limestone, the Pleistocene Calcarenite di Gravina Formation, characterised by good workability. The stone, however, can be an extremely heterogeneous building material depending on the composition of the particles and their characteristics. Six lithofacies corresponding to sub-typologies of building stones have been characterized from a chemical and mineralogical point of view. The Calcarenite di Gravina was in the past, and still is used also for the production of mortars. The aim of this study is to identify and describe the Calcarenite di Gravina as a raw material for the production of lime to be use for preserving the stones of Matera. Mineralogical and chemical results show that, despite the differences in sorting, typologies of bioclasts, cementation and porosity, they have mostly similar compositions. This confirms the good quality of Calcarenite di Gravina for the production of aerial lime. Key words: lime, building stone, soft limestone, Calcarenite di Gravina, tufina.

This research deals with the characterization of black crusts collected from Dome of Monza. Black crusts (BC) can be formed as a result of different chemical and physical reactions between the stone surface and environmental factors (such as gaseous pollutants, aerosol particulate matter and its specific chemical constituents-the carbonaceous fraction and the metals); therefore, they are considered as a passive sampler of pollutants. The specific focus of the current work is the study of the metals and their distribution within the samples. To characterize BC, several techniques were used such as: HRSEM-EDX, IC and LA-ICP/MS. This integrated approach allowed us to gain information about the mineralogical phases and the elements within the crusts giving the possibility to identify the pollution sources causing the stone decay, as well as the variability in composition depending on the exposure of the analysed surfaces.

The Late Bronze Age (ca. 1500-1200 BC) constitutes the heyday of the great empires of the ancient Near East (ANE), such as Egypt, Hatti, Mitanni, Babylonia, and Assyria. Centuries of conflicts followed by peaceful relations, marked the interrelations of these superpowers. Rich literary records in the form of archives of cuneiform texts were established. These archives contain abundant tablets whose origin is unknown. Sometimes the letterhead is missing, in other cases, we may have the name of the sender and still ignore his domicile. Further, the location of many ANE countries and cities has not yet been clearly established. Hence, revealing the origin of documents has the potential of shedding new light on the history of the ANE and beyond. The paper will discuss the use of a rich array of nondestructive testing (NDT) and minimally-destructive testing (MDT) methods for studying the composition, technology and provenance of ANE cuneiform tablets. This approach opens new horizons in the interpretation of the clay documents. We applied such analyses on hundreds of tablets from el Amarna, Ras Shamra/Ugarit, Bogazkoy/Hattusha, and sites in Cyprus and Israel/Palestine. The research project made during the last decade, serves as the basis for this study. The results raise a set of ethical and practical issues concerning the study and conservation of such precious artifacts.

This paper presents an automated procedure that enables the creation of a finite element mesh directly from the image file representing the rasterized sketch of a generic masonry element. This procedure goes under the name pixel strategy if a 2D finite element mesh is needed, where the elements are planar and rectangular; conversely, its extension in the 3D case is named voxel strategy, and there the resulting finite elements are solid bricks. The finite element meshes so obtained are then used for extracting homogenized in-plane failure surfaces for historical masonry cells, which display a non-periodic arrangement of units. These surfaces are consistent with the expected results, and their shapes suggest that the behavior of such type of masonry may range between orthotropic (if bed mortar joints are clearly noticeable) and quasi-isotropic (if some units spread over two or more masonry layers).

Italy is a high seismic risk country. Since 1900 more than 30 earthquakes with magnitude greater than Mw=5.8 occurred, and the last one is the Central Italy seismic sequence. It heavily hit the regions of Marche, Umbria, and Abruzzo causing many deaths, injuries and extensive damages on the cultural heritage. This paper analyses the church of San Francesco in Amadola, located in the Marche region that has been considered condemned for the severe damages reported after these earthquakes. The church is globally analyzed by the application of nonlinear static analysis on a Finite Element Model where the nonlinearity of masonry is taking into account with a proper constitutive law. The study wants to prove how global analysis combined by the local analysis can reproduce the behavior of this structure during a quake, showing that it can repeat the real damages produced by earthquakes.