With many refinements and improvements, the book investigates the static behaviour of many historic monuments, such as the Gothic Cathedrals, the Mycenaean Tholoi, the Pantheon, the Colosseum, the domes of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence and St Peter's in Rome, as well as the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
Masonry constructions are the great majority of the buildings in Europe's historic centres and the most important monuments of its architectural heritage.
Given the age of these constructions, the demand for safety assessments and restoration projects is pressing and constant; still within the broad studies in the subject it is not yet recognised, in particular within the seismic area, a unitary approach to deal with masonry structures.
This third edition has been driven by some recent developments of the research in the field, and it gives the fundamentals of Statics with an original and rigorous mathematical formulation, further in-depth inquired in this new version.
The last chapter (regarding the behaviour of masonry buildings under seismic actions) has been modified and integrated in order to take into account the numerous recent achievements of the research in the dynamic and seismic analysis.