ABSTRACT
Very little is known about the history of the transformations of the narthex of the Nativity Church since its construction. During the Middle Ages, the Church increasingly took on the appearance of a fortress equipping itself with walls and towers for defense. A detailed three-dimensional finite element model of the entire Church was developed by means of ABAQUS code with the aim of investigating the seismic behavior of the structure through non-linear dynamic analyses. The chapter provides a scientific validation of the hypotheses through an advanced finite element numerical simulation which attempts to reproduce the evolution of the damage up to a deformed configuration quite close to the real one, starting from a three-dimensional simplified and undeformed model of the narthex. Such a model is then discretized by means of tetrahedron elements obeying a damage plasticity law which exhibits a softening behavior in both tension and compression.
