**Abstract**

 The geotechnical instability of sites and artificial structures is a widespread problem that particularly affects heavily anthropized areas and historical cities, and often this instability is linked to human activities and to interventions carried out without adequate preliminary geotechnical studies. The most common procedure for assessing unstable sites includes base studies such as drilling boreholes, shallow excavations, and engineering geology studies. However, more and more often, some geophysical techniques are associated to the above intervention, represent the first phase of assessment, and allow optimizing the possible campaign of excavations and boreholes. Compared to direct surveys, the geophysical ones provide extensive and continuous information, are moderately invasive, and have a remarkably advantageous information-to-cost ratio. In this chapter, we illustrate two examples of characterization of unstable sites. The first case concerns the ancient walls of an Italian city, and the second one deals with the instability of a road slope. In both cases, the geotechnical modeling is also based on the results of preliminary geophysical surveys.

**Keywords:** slope instability, structure instability, geotechnical modeling, geophysical methods, refraction tomography
