Earthquake Resistant Engineering Structures VIII contains papers presented at the eighth conference in a biennial series on the subject (ERES) first held in 1996 and organized by the Wessex Institute of Technology. The 2011 meeting was held in Tuscany, a region rich in the type of cultural and architectural heritage that needs to be protected against earthquakes. Protecting the built environment in earthquake-prone regions involves not only the optimal design and construction of new facilities, but also the upgrading and rehabilitation of existing structures, including historical buildings. The type of highly specialized retrofitting employed to protect Tuscany s heritage, as well as other regions of the world, is an important area of research and appropriate to the conference objective of designing better earthquake resistant buildings. Major earthquakes and associated effects such as tsunamis continue to highlight the need to carry out more research on the topics covered by the conference. The problems will intensify as population pressure results in more buildings in regions of high seismic vulnerability. In order to design earthquake resistant structures, it is necessary to better understand these phenomena. The Conference addressed these problems and continued to expand on the development of previous meetings in the series. Papers presented at ERES are an invaluable record of the state of the art on the topic.