Knowledge to recover the built heritage: case study of "San Rocco" church in Matera, Italy”

The process of recovery, restoration and valorization of the built heritage is articulated, both for the complexity of historical architecture and for the lack of adequate intervention tools. Each monument is an expression of the territory where it was built. Therefore, it’s necessary to plan the restoration of built heritage as a system in which technical and cultural variables create a balance between decisions and processes of conservation and transformation. In this context, the technicians must activate a series of procedures to safeguard the monuments starting from the recovery of the values preserving its future memory. This methodological approach has been tested in the recovery project of the ancient masonry church of “San Rocco” in Matera (Italy). It is dated in XIV century, and it has a great importance also for the hosting cultural and social activities within the Matera Cultural Capital of Europe 2019 Program. In this paper it is shown the preliminary phase of data acquisition, the direct survey of the degradation characteristics and the historical-constructive research. Then, a critical analysis of the survey is performed together with a preliminary analysis of its seismic performance. The numerical analyses have been conducted with the macro-elements approach, where the most probably failure mechanisms of the church architectural parts are taken into considerations.