Quality and durability of bridges in Italy

Despite a modest territorial extension compared to many other states, Italy is the European country with the largest number of bridges, viaducts and tunnels due to the orographic and morphological complexity of the Italian territory. The Italian primary road network has currently an extension of 171,480 km, of which 6.9 thousand km of highways, 22.6 thousand km of state roads of national interest. The great part of the highway network has been built between ‘60s and ‘70s. At that time post tensioned and prestressed concrete (PC) have been widely used as an easy and low cost technological solution. Unfortunately since their first years, the PC structures, especially when were built in an aggressive environment, have shown an high degree of vulnerability as demonstrated by several collapse in the recent years. On the other hand since the complexity and fragility of the road network Italy was among the first countries to develop systematic tools dedicated to structure classification and aimed to be the basis of a programmed maintenance approach. An example of inspection and damage indexing following those approaches is reported in the article.