This contribution discusses the effect of steel tie-rods installed in a church façade subjected to a set of recorded earthquakes. The church façade is firstly analyzed as one-sided rocking SDOF system, considering the Housner’s model. Secondly, two configurations of tie-rods are investigated: (i) traditional tie-rods with a specific elasto-plastic constitutive law and (ii) innovative tie-rods with an additional dissipative component able to smoothen the rocking and to furtherly reduce the top horizontal displacements of the wall. The selected case study is the San Francesco church located in Mirandola, hit by the 2012 Emilia Romagna earthquake. Nonlinear dynamic analyses are performed, and the results are presented in terms of normalized displacements and energy dissipated during the earthquakes. The comparisons of the effect of traditional and innovative tie-rods are finally expressed as variation of normalized displacement and of safety indexes which can serve for design purposes.