NDT and E International 102 (2019) 9–15

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Full structural dynamic response from ambient vibration of Giotto's bell T

tower in Firenze (Italy), using modal analysis and seismic interferometry☆
G. Lacanna∗, M. Ripepe, M. Coli, R. Genco, E. Marchetti
Department of Earth Sciences, University of Florence, via G. La Pira, 4-50121, Firenze, Italy

ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT

Keywords: The preservation of historical buildings mainly depends on our capacity to monitor their ageing and quickly
Seismic interferometry detect potential damage. We show how the dynamic characteristics of a building (i.e., frequency, shapes mode
Dynamic identification and seismic wave velocity) can be automatically identified and tracked in real-time by combining modal analysis
Seismic wave dispersion with seismic interferometry. The assessment of these characteristics is performed on Giotto's bell tower in
Giotto's bell tower
Firenze, Italy, by installing a temporary network of seismic sensors. The natural frequencies and modal shapes of
Structural health monitoring
the structure are calculated by enhanced frequency domain decomposition (EFDD). The impulse response
functions estimated by following a waveform deconvolution approach are analysed to investigate the seismic
wave dispersion in Giotto's bell tower. We show that Giotto's bell tower is a dispersive structure affected by a
bending deformation, with a weak contribution from soil-system interaction. Combining the results of opera-
tional modal analysis (OMA) and seismic interferometry from the same ambient noise recording provides a
unique and complete dynamic response of important monuments such as Giotto's bell tower.

1. Introduction information on the elastic parameters of the building [4,11–15].

The dynamic response is an important quantity to measure when
determining the health status of a building [1–6]. This issue is of crucial
interest when historical structures are in area of high-to-moderate
seismic risk [7,8]. Giotto's bell tower (Fig. 1) is the most important
example of Gothic architecture in Firenze, Italy, from the 14th century,
and since then it has experienced earthquakes up to a maximum in-
tensity of Imax = VIII on the Mercalli-Cancani-Sieberg (MCS) scale
(Local Magnitude ML = 5) [9].
The dynamic response of the tower, and shape and characteristics of
its foundation are still unknown. Since its formation, seven hundred
years ago, the Opera del Duomo has preserved and enhanced the ca-
thedral, the baptistery, the bell tower, and the historical museum of
Firenze, and recently, it planned a series of studies designed to extend
our knowledge of the dynamic characteristics of these historical
monuments.
One of the main tools utilized to check the health status of a heritage
structure is dynamic response analysis using ambient vibration (wind,
traffic, sea waves, etc.) [7,8,10]. This technique, known as operational
modal analysis (OMA), is completely non-invasive and provides useful
OMA assumes that the excitation input is zero mean, Gaussian white
noise, and this assumption is closely verified since the length of the
acquired time window is longer than the fundamental period of the
building [16,17]. The time window of the data should be long enough,
with respect to the Brinker criterion [16], which requires a time series
to be 1000 times longer than the fundamental period to obtain accurate
estimates of the modal parameters from OMA techniques. The dynamic
characterization of the towers [18,19] is also a method for testing the
health status of structure, because its natural frequencies and modal
shapes are directly related to its integrity. Possible causes of damage to
an ancient building are mainly produced by cracks, ageing of materials,
and structural deformations [1]. All these phenomena cause a decrease
of stiffness, which in turn affects the natural frequencies and thus the
modal shapes [8]. Therefore, relevant damage of a building may be
detected through the change of its modal parameters [1,7,8].
However, environmental factors such as temperature, wind speed,
and rainfall can also affect the modal parameters [2,20], indicating that
changes in natural frequencies are not necessarily related to damage
[3]. Several studies using earthquakes, as well as ambient vibration
records [21–23] have demonstrated that without damage, the natural

☆
Selected paper from the 12th International Conference on non-destructive investigations and microanalysis for the diagnostics and conservation of cultural and
environmental heritage (ART′2017), Turin (Italy) – November 22–24, 2017.
∗
Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: giorgio.lacanna@unifi.it (G. Lacanna), maurizio.ripepe@unifi.it (M. Ripepe), massimo.coli@unifi.it (M. Coli),
riccardo.genco@unifi.it (R. Genco), emanuele.marchetti@unifi.it (E. Marchetti).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ndteint.2018.11.002
Received 3 June 2018; Received in revised form 21 September 2018; Accepted 3 November 2018
Available online 03 November 2018
0963-8695/ © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
G. Lacanna et al. NDT and E International 102 (2019) 9–15

frequency can vary as much as 30% due to nonlinearities in the re-

sponse of the building and to the soil-structure interactions (the hor-
izontal and rocking response of the soil) [23].
Combining OMA using automatic identification procedure via EFDD
[10,14,24,25], we investigate the seismic wave propagation with
seismic interferometry of ambient vibration [26–28]. Seismic inter-
ferometry evaluates the wave phase velocity by the impulse response
function (IRF) for different floors of the building [26,29]. In the last
decade, the seismic interferometry has been applied to estimate (1) the
IRF with ambient vibration measurements to predict the building re-
sponse of moderately sized earthquakes [30], and (2) to assess the
structural nature (bending-shear beam) of the building, and conse-
quently the degree of the soil-system interaction by investigating the
dispersion of seismic waves [31–34].
The presence of bending in the deformation of high rise buildings
and the soil-system interactions may affect the phase velocity and
generate a larger attenuation of the lower modal frequency [32,33,35].
Consequently, ignoring the soil-system interaction would overestimate
the degree of the bending, and likewise, ignoring the dispersion in
modal identification would overestimate the soil-system interaction
[33]. In addition, as already demonstrated [23,26,36,37], the phase
velocity in the higher frequency band is uncoupled from the soil-system
interaction, making it more sensitive to the structural properties of the
building than to the natural frequency.
Therefore, by combining the results of seismic interferometry with
those of modal parameters we obtain, for the first time, a comprehen-
sive view and a unique, full dynamic response of Giotto's bell tower,
which can be considered as the starting point for a more focused plan
for the preservation of this historical monument. Fig. 1. Vertical cross-section of the Giotto's bell tower in Firenze (courtesy of
“Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore”) in the north-south direction, with the position
2. Giotto's bell tower description and testing set-up and the height from the ground of ten seismic stations used for ambient vi-
bration test.
The bell tower has square base of 14.45 m, perfectly north-south
(NS) and west-east (WE) oriented, and it is 84.7 m height (Fig. 1). It
presents four intermediate floors, and four buttresses mark the corners.
The masonry of the bell tower consists of stone (pietra forte: a quartz-
calcareous turbidite sandstone, quarried in the hills south of Firenze)
and mortar. White Carrara marble and other coloured marble tiles form
the revetment of external sides of the bell tower.
The Romans settled Firenze in the Arno plain, close to a ford along
the Arno River. This plain is a tectono-sedimentary basin developed in
the last million years. The city centre lies on a bed of recent fluvial
deposits, mainly pebble and gravels, from clean to silty, with lenses of
sands [38]. The historical information on the foundation of Giotto's bell
tower are few and discordant; one of the first is provided by Giorgio
Vasari [1568] who reports a depth of the foundation at ∼6 m. On this
site the subsoil consists of 16 m of alluvial gravels (Fig. 2) with good
geotechnical properties: (cohesion) c’ = 10 kPa, phi = 40°, (P-wave
velocity) Vp = 1400 m/s and (S-wave velocity) Vs = 380 m/s. The
water table is historically stable at approximately 7 m below the ground Fig. 2. Schematic west-east cross-section of the Duomo square, including the
datum and has a seasonal excursion of ± 1.5 m (Fig. 2). foundation setting.
The seismic survey presented in this work was carried out for only
36 h, from October 16, 2013 to October 18, 2013, with ten seismic
stations (Fig. 1). Each seismic station was equipped with 3-component combine the results from OMA and seismic interferometry using the
seismometers, outlined as follows: six stations with Lennartz 3D/5s same ambient vibration noise.
seismometers (sensitivity 400 V/m/s and with a 5 s eigen period); three
stations with Guralp CMG-6T seismometer (sensitivity 2400 V/m/s with 3. Automated operational modal analysis
a 10 s eigen period), and one station with a Guralp CMG-40T seism-
ometer (sensitivity 800 V/m/s with a 30 s eigen period). The seismic Many authors have illustrated the EFDD method [10,12,14], which
data were digitized using a 24-bit Guralp CMG24 Digitizer at 100 Hz, is a frequency domain technique for operational modal analysis of
and the time synchronization between stations was achieved using GPS. structures. We performed an automatic EFDD method, first presented
The ten stations were installed on five different floors from the ground by Brincker et al. (2007) and developed by Rainieri and Fabbrocino
level up to the roof. Five stations were installed on the north side (C02- et al. (2010), to automatically estimate the modal parameters of the
C04-C06-C08-C10), and the other five on the south side (C01-C03-C05- structure.
C07-C09) of Giotto's bell tower (Fig. 1). The 36 h of records were divided into 1800-s-long windows of time
Seismic monitoring provided an excellent data set that allowed us to with 66% overlap. Then, spectral estimation was performed using the

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G. Lacanna et al. NDT and E International 102 (2019) 9–15

Fig. 3. The automatic EFDD technique is based on detecting the modal band-
width using the mean a) and the standard deviation b) of the modal coherence.
c) first singular values estimated for the entire observation time. The singular
values with other peaks over those with the modal frequencies are related to the
noise introduced by the swinging of bells, that it has a duration of 90 s corre-
sponding to a time interval 20 times shorter than the window of data (1800 s)
used in EFDD technique, and with the strong excitation signal not affecting the
resulting of modal frequencies.

Table 1
The statistic result of modal frequencies. In the fourth and fifth column, the
value in brackets is the relative variation as a percentage of the mean fre-
quency.
Mode Frequency (Hz) Standard Frequency (Hz) Frequency (Hz)
number mean deviation min (%) max (%)

1 0.623 0.002 0.618 (0.76) 0.628 (0.80)

2 0.647 0.002 0.642 (0.81) 0.652 (0.73)
3 2.543 0.014 2.520 (0.90) 2.573 (1.18)
4 3.081 0.011 3.052 (0.93) 3.105 (0.79)
5 3.156 0.009 3.134 (0.68) 3.174 (0.57) Fig. 4. Three-dimensional representation of the six modes.
6 5.731 0.037 5.667 (1.01) 5.812 (1.4)

Welch's technique with a Hanning weighting function and a frequency

resolution of 0.0031 Hz.
The automatic EFDD procedure is described in detail in Lacanna at
al. 2016 [25]. The automatic EFDD method detected the first six modes
of Giotto's bell tower (Fig. 3c). The natural frequencies are listed in
Table 1 and were obtained from the plot in Fig. 3c. The modal shapes
are automatically searched within the modal domain (or modal band-
width) using the modal coherence [10,25]. The modal coherence will
be 1 for stationary signals and defines the modal domain due to the
structural modes (Fig. 3c). The mean of > 0.96 (Fig. 3a) and the stan-
dard deviation of < 0.01 (Fig. 3b), calculated for a set of 10 consecutive
modal coherences, is used to reduce the noise and to identify the modal
domain [10,24]. Analysis of the modal frequency of Giotto's bell tower
has already been performed using radar [18], but only the first mode of
0.62 Hz was detected. Therefore, for the first time, we have a full
analysis of the modal identification of Giotto's bell tower.
Fig. 4 shows an example of the first six modal shapes estimated by
the EFDD procedure. We show that the Giotto's bell tower is char-
acterized by a translational first modal shape with movement trending
in the 51°–231° N direction (Fig. 5a), and with a frequency of 0.623 Hz,
whereas the second modal shape is transversal and trends in the
141°–321° N direction (Fig. 5a) with a frequency of 0.647 Hz. Giotto's
bell tower exhibits a coupled behaviour in the first two modes acting
along the longitudinal and transverse directions at frequencies very
close to each other, resulting in a slightly eccentric circular movement
in the N-S direction (Fig. 5b).
The third mode shows a torsional modal shape at 2.543 Hz, whereas
the fourth and fifth modes are transversal modal shapes at 3.081 Hz and
3.156 Hz, respectively (Fig. 4). The sixth mode shows a transversal
modal shape at 5.731 Hz moving mainly in E-W direction (Fig. 4).
Fig. 5. a) Particle motion of normalized modal displacement evaluated at the
C10 station of the first mode (black) and second mode (blue) b) The vector sum
of the two first modes produces a circular movement slightly eccentric in the NS
direction.
The modal frequencies extracted automatically during the ob-
servation period show an increment of all six modal frequencies (Fig. 6)
at approximately 12:00 UTC on October 17. Several studies have ob-
served this variation in long-term operational modal analysis
[2,7,8,39], and it has been explained as due to thermal expansion
(Carrara marble 0.0075 mm/m °C [40]), which produces a closing of
the superficial cracks with a consecutive increase in the structural
stiffness and the modal frequencies. Additionally, the correlation be-
tween temperature and frequency depends strongly on the material
properties [39]. Guillier et al. [39] found that the thermal diffusivity of
the wall may cause a relative variation of the building stiffness as large
as 10% by using 1 month of continuous records of the temperature
dependence and frequency. However, our observation period is too
short to conclude on these thermal effects, and long-term measurements

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G. Lacanna et al.
Fig. 6. Trend over time of the natural frequencies (black) and temperature (red)
a) of the 6° mode, b) of the 5° mode, c) of the 4° mode, d) of the 3° mode, e) of
the 2° mode, f) of the 1° mode.
of environmental ambient conditions are needed, especially when the
modal frequencies are used for structural health monitoring purposes
[5,7,8,20].
4. Seismic interferometry
The building impulse response function (IRF) is estimated using
seismic interferometry, which allows us to analyse the spatial dis-
tribution of the seismic wave velocity along the building. Seismic in-
terferometry is based on the deconvolution D ( ) of the signal uref (t)
recorded at a reference station with the signal ui(t) recorded at a gen-
eric station (i), and is represented in the frequency domain by Refs.
[26,27,30]:
ui ( ) uref *( )
D( ) =
|uref ( )|2 +
where the asterisk denotes the complex conjugate, and the parameter
is set to 0.5% of the mean amplitude uref ( ) spectral power. Deconvo-
lution was applied to 120-s-long records of ambient noise using the
signal recorded at the top floor (C10 for north side stations and C09 for
south side stations, in Fig. 1) as the reference station, and then the
resulting waveforms were filtered in broad-band frequency of
0.2–20 Hz, and stacked over the 1800-s intervals. The result is a wave
propagating up and down through the building (Fig. 7). The IRFs,
stacked every 1800 s at Giotto's bell tower, show a high signal-to-noise
ratio (Fig. 7) for the whole 36-h-long period of observation and in-
dicates that this time period is long enough for interferometry analysis.
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NDT and E International 102 (2019) 9–15
Fig. 7. Stacking waveforms over 1800-s intervals of the IRFs for all 36 h and
filtered in broad band frequency of 0.2–20 Hz, a) UD component, b) NS com-
ponent and c) EW component for north side stations. d) UD component, e) NS
component and f) EW component for south side stations. The red lines indicate
the total IRF stacking for each station and component.
Here, we estimate the three-dimensional (UD, NS, EW) propagation of
the seismic waves using the peak amplitude of the down-going wave.
For each deconvolved waveform, we automatically detect the arrival
time of the peak amplitude at each floor, and we calculate, using a least
squares fit, the velocity of the seismic waves from the slope of the travel
time (Fig. 8).
This procedure is performed for the three components (Fig. 8). The
given errors are estimated assuming the elevation of the stations is error
free, and only errors in the arrival times are considered [28]. A com-
pressional P-wave characterizes the IRF along the vertical component,
and, given the large velocity (Fig. 7a, d and 8a, d), only the signals
recorded between the bottom (C01-C02 stations), the third floor (C05-
C06 stations), and the top floor (C09-C10 stations) are considered. The
compressional P-wave velocity is Vp = 2040 ± 40 m/s, with an error
of ± 6.2%. The horizontal component is used to estimate the shear S-
wave velocity, Vs , for the total stacked IRFs (the red line in Fig. 7), and
is the same in both horizontal components of motion (VNS
= 478 ± 29 m/s and VEW = 478 ± 29 m/s), with an error of ± 2%
(Table 2). The measured compressional wave velocity is 4.2 times faster
than shear velocity, indicating a compressive stiffness much greater
than the shear stiffness (Fig. 9). The shear wave velocities exhibit
(Fig. 10) a small increase of approximately 5.6% (Table 2) for the EW
component (Fig. 10d, h) during daytime. This variation is comparable
with the calculated error, indicating that the acquisition system at
100 Hz is not high enough to track the possible daily changes induced
by the temperature.
G. Lacanna et al.
Fig. 8. Travel time at different floors versus distance to the roof, considering
a,d) the UD component, b,e) NS component and c,f) EW component evaluated
from the total IRF stacking (red lines in Fig. 7). The velocity is estimated using a
least squares fit for the stations located to the north side (upper panel) and to
the south side (lower panel). The best fit solution is shown for each component
including the error.
As clearly demonstrated by several studies [32–34], the velocity
estimated from the broader frequency band (0.2–20 Hz, Fig. 8) is re-
presentative of high frequency seismic wave propagation. In high-rise
buildings, such as a tower, possible bending deformation and soil-
structure interaction may produce the dispersion in the seismic wave
[32,33]. Dispersion is characterized by a lower phase velocity in the
band containing the fundamental modal frequency and weak changes in
the higher frequency [31–33]. We filtered the IRFs into three frequency
bands. The first band, between 0.2 and 1.5 Hz (Fig. 10a, d, g, l), con-
tains the first two modal frequencies; the second band, between 1.5 and
4.5 Hz (Fig. 10b, e, h, m), contains the third, fourth, and fifth modal
shapes; and the third frequency band, between 4.5 and 7.5 Hz (Fig. 10c,
f, i, n), contains the sixth modal shape. We found that seismic velocity is
frequency dependent, and it increases in the higher frequency band
(Table 3) for both north and south configurations and for both hor-
izontal components (Fig. 10), indicating that Giotto's bell tower is a
dispersed structure. The dispersion phenomenon affects the lower
modal frequency more than the higher frequency; therefore, the ratio of
the second longitudinal/transversal to the first longitudinal/transversal
modal frequency is often used to assess the nature of the structure
[33,35], and this ratio varies from a minimum of 3 (pure shear beam) to
a maximum of 6.2 (pure bending beam) [35] (Fig. 11). Giotto's bell
tower has a ratio value of 4.98, which seems in part to indicate an effect
of a bending deformation on the dynamic behaviour of the tower
(Fig. 11). However, this ratio is also controlled by the soil-structure
interaction, which can cause lower the velocity in the fundamental
frequency band [32–34]. When the soil presents good mechanical
Table 2
The statistic result of seismic wave velocity for the three components. The value in brackets is the relative variation as a percentage of the mean velocity.
Velocity mean (m/s) Velocity error (m/s) (%)
North Side Station South Side Station North Side Station South Side Station
UD 2040 2040 ± 40 (2) ± 40 (2)
NS 478 478 ± 29 (6.2) ± 29 (6.2)
EW 478 478 ± 29 (6.2) ± 29 (6.2)
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NDT and E International 102 (2019) 9–15
Fig. 9. a, e) Trend over time of the temperature (red line) and trend over time
of the seismic velocities, including the error bar evaluated for each IRF, b) UD
component, c) NS component, d) EW component for the North-side stations, f)
UD component, g) NS component, h) EW component for the south side stations.
properties, as in the case of the site of Giotto's bell tower, a weak
contribution of the soil-structure interaction is expected, and its con-
tribution on the modal frequency cannot be neglected.
5. Conclusion
The dynamic response of the Giotto's bell tower is investigated for
the first time using ambient noise vibration and has allowed us to re-
cover full modal frequencies and modal shapes, thereby expanding our
knowledge of this important historical building. OMA indicates that the
first two modes, corresponding to frequencies of 0.623 Hz and
0.646 Hz, respectively, are both mainly translational and coupled to-
gether, resulting in a semi-elliptic translational movement of the tower.
Our analysis shows that the modal shapes of Giotto's bell tower at
2.543 Hz (third mode), 3.081 Hz (fourth mode), 3.156 Hz (fifth mode)
and 5.731 Hz (sixth mode) are well separated from each other, corre-
sponding to a torsional mode (third mode), and three translational
modes. Despite the relatively short time of analysis (36 h), we found
clear indications of a positive correlation between the ambient tem-
perature and changes in all six modal frequencies on the order of 1%
(Table 1). This correlation has been already reported for other struc-
tures, and it can be explained by crack closure in masonry walls due to
stone dilatation produced by the temperature gradient, with a con-
sequent stiffening of the structure [2,7,8,20,32,39].
The ambient noise was also used to measure the shear wave pro-
pagation in the building using seismic interferometry. The distribution
of the shear wave velocity measured along the building (Fig. 8) is equal
in both horizontal directions (VNS = VEW = 478 m/s), indicating a
homogeneous distribution of the stiffness of Giotto's bell tower.
To evaluate the dynamic nature of the building, we analysed the
dispersion of the seismic wave by filtering the IRFs into three frequency
Velocity min (m/s) (%) Velocity max (m/s) (%)
North Side Station South Side Station North Side Station South Side Station
2040 2040 2040 2040
468 (2) 468 (2) 491 (2.7) 481 (0.6)
465 (2.7) 455 (4.8) 505 (5.6) 505 (5.6)
G. Lacanna et al. NDT and E International 102 (2019) 9–15

Fig. 11. Evolution of frequency ratio fi/f1 in function of parameter C (Boutin

et al. [31], Fig. 1); the red square is the ratio of second longitudinal to first
longitudinal modal frequency of Giotto's bell tower.

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the Opera del Duomo for their support during the
installation of the seismic equipment. The paper has been improved by
the constructive comments of two anonymous reviewers.

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