Italy is located in a very active seismic zone, and many earthquakes have marked the country, some of them in the recent past. In order to take adequate measures of seismic prevention and protection, in the last decades, the Italian Civil Protection Department (DPC) initiated a survey and introduced a specific form for the quick and/or post-seismic assessment of buildings. This is useful to obtain statistics on the types of structures and their vulnerability and a judgement on the damage, leading to a decision about the possibility of reuse and/or the level of retrofitting to be applied. Those activities have been developed since the beginning of 2000. This task is currently carried out by the Italian DPC-ReLUIS project research, line WP2 on the inventory of building structures, setting up the CARTIS form for any structural type, like masonry, reinforced concrete, precast concrete, steel, and timber structures, the latter being mainly related to large span buildings, extensively used in Italy. In this context, the paper presents the first draft of the CARTIS form for large span timber structures that provides a general description for typical structural schemes, through the singular points commonly considered as seismic structural vulnerabilities. Moreover, the statistics on timber large span structures based on a sample of 10 buildings is presented.

Long-span structures such as school gyms and sports centres are often used by the Italian Department of Civil Protection as post-catastrophe shelters or headquarters. The Emilia 2012 earthquake drew the attention of the department to this type of structure due to the damage that many of these buildings suffered. In this work, a dataset of 101 timber structures was analysed based on a simplified methodology that detects the major vulnerabilities in long-span timber roofs in order to help plan further investigations and retrofit interventions. Using fast and straightforward approaches, the elements most vulnerable to seismic action were analysed quantitatively and qualitatively. Quantitative evaluation of the vulnerabilities was achieved by applying the Italian Building Code. The aspects not considered in the quantitative evaluation were assessed through qualitative parameters inspired by damage identification forms (e.g. the AeDES form). The analysed structures are located near the epicentres of the last strong earthquakes that struck Italian territory: Abruzzo in 2009, Emilia in 2012 and central Italy in 2016. Damage and retrofits, identified by interviewing owners, designers and builders, showed a good correlation between the real behaviour shown by the surveyed structures and the vulnerabilities detected using the simplified methodology.