In its current form, the Franciscan convent in the town of Castelli, in Italy’s Teramo province, dates back to the second half of the 17th century. It presents an evenly distributed layout arrayed around a richly frescoed cloister.
From the start of the last century, and up through at least the nineteen-thirties, the archaeological site at Ostia Antica became a place where the latest advances in the field of restoration were applied through original approaches while, at the same time, new and intriguing working strategies were put to the test.
In this paper, the behaviour of an idealised excavation carried out in a clay sensitive to destructuration is studied through a series of finite-element analyses, employing an advanced bounding surface model developed for structured clays. Several cases are examined, in order to investigate the influence of factors including the velocity of destructuration, the damage produced by the wall construction to the soil-wall contact, the width-to-height ratio of the excavation. The case of a soil deposit insensitive to microstructural damage is also studied for comparison.
Monitoring surface deformation on dams is commonly carried out by in situ geodetic surveying, which is time consuming and characterized by some limitations in space coverage and frequency. More recently microwave satellite-based technologies, such as advanced-DInSAR (Differential Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry), have allowed the integration and improvement of the observation capabilities of ground-based methods thanks to their effectiveness in collecting displacement measurements on many non-destructive control points, corresponding to radar reflecting targets.
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