Towards the definition of a maintenance plan for the old town centers. the preliminary cognitive

This paper provides considerations about the benefits associated with the mplementation of a maintenance plan in our old town centers, above all in the smaller ones where the interest towards issues such as the tutelage and the conservation of the historical goods is lower and far surely from the most important touristic flows and their satellite activities. The implementation of a maintenance plan in an old town could contribute incisively to its conservation as well as its promotion and valorization. Such a plan can be defined only after an initial cognitive phase practicable using a methodology of survey repeatable systematically on all the buildings making up the generic urban surrounding. With the objective to define a suitable cognitive methodological process, it has been chosen as a case study the De Matera building, located in the old center of Cosenza, on which the preliminary analyses, necessary to define a possible maintenance plan, have been developed. In particular, the following moments of survey have been addressed: the territorial, historical and architectural contextualization; the architectural survey of the case study and the analysis of the material decay detected on the masonry elements; the characterization of building materials performed by means laboratory tests to SEM; structural analyses through which an appropriate indicator of the seismic vulnerability has been possible to evaluate.