Project and construction techniques in post-seismic reconstructions at the beginning of the 20th century

The disastrous earthquakes, which have hit the Italian peninsula over the centuries, have always aroused a lot of public opinion and the involvement of the scientific community to find technical solutions and planning criteria to individuate an anti-seismic construction typology to be adopted in reconstructing centers hit by earthquakes. Following these great catastrophes, numerous commissions were set up with the responsibility to visit the places involved in order to draw up reports describing the damages to the buildings. These reports highlighted both the lack of and the resistance of local construction techniques during the earthquakes, and were aimed at identifying what solutions would have better withstood the earth tremors. Over the centuries, such memories, reported by highly educated people, became the basic tool to establish the construction rules and provisions aimed at regulating the construction in high risk earthquake areas. Today, they are an important testimony to what were the materials and techniques used in the historical buildings in earthquake hit zones. The disastrous events that, from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century, shook the south of Italy, also raised a great awareness of the situation and triggered debates of great interest in the cultural, theoretical-scientific and practical-construction worlds. During the same years, progress in the construction world leapt ahead, including the widespread use of reinforced concrete, the designing of models to calculate the structures and the systematizing of seismological knowledge, which were changing the planning approaches linked to the problem of seismic activity in Italy. The large quantity of scientific interpretations, technical solutions, construction systems and patents which were proposed, made up a patrimony of valuable knowledge to study in-depth a specific moment in the history of construction, in which we can see the beginnings of the new discipline of anti-seismic engineering.