Long-Term Dynamic Monitoring of a Large Cathedral: Environmental Effects and Seismic Performance

Vibration-based monitoring is receiving increasing attention in Civil Engineering but practical applications on heritage structures are still not frequent. Since October 2018, a dynamic monitoring system is active in the Milan Cathedral with the main objective of continuously extracting features which are representative of the current state of structural health. The paper is aimed at presenting selected results from the monitoring of the Milan Cathedral by applying the statistical pattern recognition framework to the dynamic responses continuously collected during about 5 years. Finally, as the responses to a couple of significant seismic events were recorded during the considered monitoring period, comments are given on the seismic behaviour of the cathedral.