The management and the safeguard of existing buildings and infrastructures are actual tasks for structural engineering. Non-invasive structural monitoring techniques can provide useful information for supporting the management process and the safety evaluation, reducing at once the impact of disturbances on the structure’s functionality. This paper focuses on the exploitation of advanced multi-temporal differential synthetic aperture radar interferometry (DInSAR) products for the structural monitoring of buildings and infrastructures, subjected to different external actions. In this framework, a methodological approach is proposed, based on the integration of DInSAR measurements with historical sources, accurate 3D modelling and consistent positioning of the reflecting targets in the GIS environment. Documentary sources can prove particularly helpful in collecting technical information, to reconstruct an accurate 3D geometry of the building under monitoring, limiting in-situ surveys. The analysis of DInSAR-based displacements time series and mean deformation velocity values allows the identification of possible critical situations for buildings to be monitored. The paper presents different approaches, with increasing accuracy levels, to study the active deformative processes of the examined buildings and the related damage assessment. An insight into these interpretative approaches is given through the application of the proposed procedure to two case studies in the city of Rome (Italy), the residential building named Torri Stellari in Valco San Paolo (1951–1953) and the housing complex referred to as Corviale (1967–1983), by exploiting the whole COSMO-SkyMed data archive (both ascending and descending acquisitions), collected during the 2011–2019 time interval. Pros and cons of the various approaches are deeply discussed, together with an estimation of the required computational effort.

Structural health monitoring is a crucial issue in areas with different hazard sources, such as Italy. Among non-invasive monitoring techniques, remote sensing provides useful information in supporting the management process and safety evaluations, reducing the impact of disturbances on the functionality of construction systems. The ground displacement time-series based on the analysis of Differential Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (DInSAR) measurements, as well as the information about the geology of the area and the geometry of the construction under monitoring, provides useful data for the built environment’s structural assessment. This paper focuses on the structural monitoring and damage assessment of constructions based on the GIS integration of DInSAR measurements, geological investigation, historical surveys and 3D modeling. The methodology is applied to the residential area of Valco San Paolo in the city of Rome (Italy). Once the geological interpretation has confirmed the results of the DInSAR measurements, a quick damage assessment that considers all the possible conditions of the pre-existing damage at the time zero of the monitoring is shown for a damaged manufact in the area. The presented results highlight how the strategy to correlate the DInSAR-monitored ground settlements with the damage scales allows potentially to monitor continuous construction systems.

The setting up of efficient strategies for safety assessments and maintenance of modern existing bridges is a crucial research challenge in structural engineering. In Italy, this topic has recently been addressed in guidelines issued by the Ministry of Infrastructures and Transport in 2020. The guidelines outline procedures and tools for safety assessments and maintenance interventions: a mandatory step is the analysis of original documents (concerning the design, the construction process and the maintenance interventions) in order to acquire robust knowledge of the structure. As noted in recent works in the literature, non-invasive structural monitoring approaches play a crucial role in the safety assessment of existing bridges. One such approach is multi-temporal differential synthetic aperture radar interferometry (DInSAR). This paper presents a cross-disciplinary process for the structural monitoring of modern existing bridges, based on integration of DInSAR measurements, exploiting Cosmo-SkyMed measurements collected during the period 2011–2019, and accurate knowledge of the structures derived from analysis of original documents conserved in historical archives. The procedure is applied to two reinforced concrete Gerber bridges in Rome, designed in the 1930s.

In the Twentieth Century, the industrial buildings featured a broad experimentation on the load-bearing structures suited to the production spaces. Among the structural elements explicitly designed for factories were reinforced concrete thin shells. In Italy, where reinforced concrete was the predominant construction technique for the entire century, the evolution of the thin shells for industrial buildings traced a significant story: starting from the introduction of foreign systems and patents in the 1920s, the design and construction of the thin shells gradually stacked to national productive and technological specificities. This paper presents a historical investigation of the application of thin shells in Italy between 1930 and 1970, remarking, thus, the local contribution of Italian contractors and designers in the evolution of both the design solutions and production process. Furthermore, the study presents a systematic historical and technical framework related to thin shells to support the actions of knowledge and safeguard the industrial building heritage.

This paper is a review of Italy's civil engineering heritage after the unification of the country (1861/1870), one of the series of national profiles being published by Engineering History and Heritage. This paper excludes ancient engineering works, as in Italy, these fall under the heading of archaeological heritage for both legal and cultural purposes, and focuses only on the civil and structural engineering heritage of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is presented under four headings: 'Italy's major civil engineering achievements', 'National and regional recognition of engineering heritage','Exemplar conservation of engineering structures' and 'Information sources for engineering heritage'. The paper discusses engineering structures of heritage importance, including major iron and steel structures developed in the nineteenth century, such as the 150m arch railway bridge over the River Adda in Paderno (1886); the urban arcades of Milan (1864), Genoa (1874) and Naples (1887); early application of reinforced concrete in large structures such as Risorgimento Bridge in Rome (1911); concrete dams for the development of the hydroelectricity industry, such as the Santa Chiara dam in Sardinia (1924); reinforced-concrete bridges and viaducts for the reconstruction of the national highway network after World War II, such as the viaducts of the Autostrada del Sole (1956-1964); and signature structures in reinforced concrete such as Pier Luigi Nervi's domes for the Olympic Games in Rome (1960), Riccardo Morandi's Polcevera viaduct in Genoa (1966) and Sergio Musmeci's Basento Bridge in Potenza (1975). The paper concludes with a short list of organisations involved in the conservation of engineering structures and sources giving further information about Italian engineering heritage.