Wood in the structural restoration of masonry buildings

There is a vast building heritage composed mostly of masonry buildings and monuments, that describes and characterizes the face of today's cities. There is a need to intervene on the built to safeguard the own life of this historical-architectural heritage, respecting its nature and therefore preserving the memory of ancient technologies and original configurations that reveal to the history and evolution of humanity. That's how the "route of restoration", the working methods, the materials used and the structural schemes become as relevant as the final goals that are to be achieved. Masonry buildings are often characterized by the presence of wooden structural elements. Wood was anciently used in its natural configuration by working on different types of wood exclusively by peeling and shearing the stems, thus obtaining slender elements to be used for horizontals structures. The versatility of wood combined with modern technologies, as of today, has allowed the development of innovative high performance elements such as laminated wood, and X-Lam panels, which have exceeded the limits of solid wood elements such as limited mechanical resistance, anisotropy, constitutive defects, restricted availability of profiles. Therefore wood represents an opportunity to realize structural retrofit strategies where the ancient and the modern find a right synthesis. In this paper we describe studies, surveys and wood realizations for structural use in restoration interventions.