The architrave a tasselli is a peculiar design shape of the traditional stone lintels, which are widespread in Abruzzo, Italy stone lintels are not usually monolithic elements, being formed by three pieces, the block spanning the opening and the tasselli, two small rectangular pieces. In the current paper, by means of an elementary Wrinkler-type beam model, it has been attempted to capture the behavior of stone lintels, chasing the mechanical reasons supporting this traditional construction technique. The use of stone architraves belongs to the architectural heritage of many traditional buildings in Abruzzo, Italy. Their use is now confined to restoration works, since masonry is considered obsolete for new buildings. The architraves, which are widespread in Abruzzo (Italy), have two main configurations, a standard one, i.e. a monolithic element spanning from one support to the other and the so-called a tasselli configuration. Varagnoli  was the first to introduce such nomenclature a tasselli, to intend the disarticulation of stone lintels into three parts: a central one, resting on the piers, roughly for one third of their sections, and two extreme pieces the tasselli. In this paper, the authors will refer to the architrave a tasselli as to the Piece-Type (PT) architrave. It may be difficult to understand why the architraves, belonging to the second configuration, are widespread in earthquake-prone areas an adequate too thing of the architraves inside the masonry should be an important requirement for spandrels-piers frame interaction under earthquake. Actually, hundreds of examples of similar architraves can be found in Abruzzo. The use of the PT architraves is a technique difficult to date, many examples are evidenced from mid-1700s buildings, up to the early 1900s. In this paper an elementary mathematical model representing the PT architrave is proposed, then it is attempted to understand the physical reasons supporting the peculiar disarticulation of stone lintels into three sub-elements. More....    

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