Rayleigh wave propagation can occur according to complex mode excitation such that the interpretation of the phase or group velocity spectra can be erroneous thus leading to wrong reconstruction of the subsurface shear-wave velocity profile. In this paper, we present a case study solved by considering the holistic analysis of the Rayleigh waves recorded by a single 3-component (3C) geophone and inverted by considering the groupvelocity spectra of the radial and vertical components together with

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... the Radial-to-Vertical Spectral Ratio (RVSR) and the RPM (Rayleigh-wave Particle Motion) frequency curve. In order to test the performance of the adopted methodologies, we intentionally considered a complex site characterized by a high level of background noise and a limited space for the data acquisition. In addition, passive data collected by the same 3C geophone are used to compute the Horizontalto-Vertical Spectral Ratio (HVSR). Due to the vibrations produced by a nearby excavator, in order to obtain a meaningful HVSR we selected only a small portion of the recorded data. Computed HVSR is then jointly inverted with the active data to further validate the retrieved subsurface model and obtain information about the shear-wave velocities of the deeper layers. Altogether, four different inversion strategies are pursued and the obtained V S profiles compared also with the results from a local penetrometer test and some borehole data. ARTICLE INFO