Masonry Arch Bridges: Typical Features and Structural Issues

The paper focuses on masonry arch bridges, which represent a significant portion of the entire infrastructural asset of both road and railway networks, despite their ancientness. The study is part of a wider activity that the Province of Caserta and the Department of Architecture and Industrial Design of the University of Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli” are jointly carrying on. Such a collaboration is aimed at defining and applying methodologies for a correct and smart handling of road bridges spread on the territory of the Caserta district, whose infrastructural heritage counts about 900 bridges. Within this activity, preliminary data concerning the typological characteristics of about 100 masonry arch bridges were collected. These data allowed to recognize typical features distinguishing masonry arch bridges of this area, which can be considered representative also at a national level. Then, evidence from some in-situ inspections performed on 50 bridges are also presented. In particular, the main structural issues have been surveyed and a statistical analysis of the observed defects has been carried out. The study highlighted the main structural issues typically affecting existing masonry arch bridges, as well as the need to adopt far-sighting managing policies for administrative bodies called to handle wide infrastructural heritages.