2023 – Burano, Venezia, Italy – Investigations and SHM of the leaning St. Martino bell tower

The bell tower, built between 1703 and 1714, is 53 meters high and has a square plan with a side of 6.20 meters at the base. In the construction, entirely in “exposed” brick masonry, four sections are recognisable: the base, three meters high in ashlar brick, the barrel, the nut and the spire. Thanks to its steep slope it has become the symbol of the island of Burano. The structure suffered the first failures already during the construction phase which progressed slowly until after the Second World War, a period in which rapid increases were recorded to the point that the Municipality of Venice began an important static consolidation intervention carried out by the Fondedile company of Naples, concluded in 1970.
Expin carried out an organic set of structural investigations aimed at understanding the underground structures and defining the state of conservation of the reinforcement devices used in the 1960s intervention, to determine the current state of health of the bell tower and to allow for appropriate conservative interventions.