In 2018 a collaborative project between Politecnico di Milano (PoliMI) and Regione Lombardia (RL) was launched to join forces and expertise toward the improvement of the regional transport infrastructures maintenance management. One of the project goals was the development of regional guidelines aimed to support the design and implementation of monitoring systems for bridges. The focus of this paper is on the illustration of the Monitoring Regional (MoRe) guidelines and of their implementation on nine pilot monitoring systems designed and deployed within the project. The (MoRe) guidelines tackle the entire monitoring process from the analyses of the monitoring goals and the preliminary investigations needed to the identification of the phenomena and relevant indicators to monitor, up to the selection of monitoring devices and the presentation of results. A short illustration of the permanent monitoring systems installed on nine exemplary bridges in the Lombardia region concludes the paper.

The present study deals with the structural safety evaluation of a 50-year-old river bridge, called Baghetto Bridge, located in north Italy on the Adda River. Generally speaking, hydraulic processes are the main cause of bridge failure. Scour and hydrodynamic loads have been largely studied by the hydraulic engineering community; however, in practice, integration with structural analysis is often missing. The aim of this research is to provide a multidisciplinary procedure based on hydraulic and dynamic investigations devoted to the structural verification and monitoring of river bridges with traditional mechanical bearings. The deck–river interaction is addressed, studying the influence of debris accumulation on the bridge and performing structural verification of the bearing supports. The actions exerted on the bridge deck by the river current were estimated following the recommendations of the Italian code and making some further assumptions. In addition, dynamic investigations and FE modelling were performed. The results show (1) a relatively fast procedure that can be applied by practitioners to perform structural verification of river bridges with traditional mechanical bearings, and (2) an investigation method to evaluate temperature–frequency correlation as a reference for future inspections.

Correct approaches to the assessment of historic structures involve the collection of data related to materials, building technology, eventual damage and decay, and transformation that has occurred over time. The procedure proposed by the authors is based on multidisciplinary research, merging data ranging from documentary and archive research to structural modeling. In the developed procedure, the minimization of the costs and timing of the structural assessment were the main requirements. The procedure, implemented on the Arengario, the 13th-century Town Hall of Monza, focuses on the key role of historic and documentary research in order to highlight the difference in the building technology. The overall research program involves the following steps: (i) historical analysis and documentary research; (ii) visual inspections, geometric survey, and decay/damage identification and mapping; and (iii) dynamic testing and modal identification, with these steps driving the choices involved in the subsequent step: (iv) FE modeling and updating.