The Plan of Street Levelling in Catania 1820-1879

The paper analyses the design and the execution of the Catania's XIX century levelling plan which represented a deep changing both in the exterior and in the structural aspect of the historical buildings. As well as in the other Italian cities at the beginning of the XIX century, also in Catania started out a vast debate on the public health and the urban decorum. As consequence of the levelling a lot of problems and damages on the existing simple or monumental buildings arose, because, the previous ground floors were, to second of the cases, buried or elevated of some metres on respect the new street level. The paper try to understand the technical process used to execute both the street levelling and the correlated repairing works on the front buildings and to evaluate if these latter could assume a relevance in nowadays seismic vulnerability of the historical masonry buildings of the Catania centre.