TOTAL AND PARTIAL FAKES, REBUILT FURNITURE Cupboard XVIth. century Detail before the restoration Married furnishings or "marriage" is the word internationally used among the antique dealers to define furniture with two functional parts, for example a cupboard with a lower part and an higher one. When one of these parts is missing, the restorer often replaces it with another one of the same style. The possible controversy about the authenticity of this typology of furniture can be not theoretically resolved but instead with the causes of a minor cost. A lower price, with no apparent motive, of a so restored piece of furniture, should induce the customer to do a careful check. Cupboard XVIth. century Detail before the restoration The production and the trade of these married furniture started in Italy, mostly in Umbria and Tuscany, around the second half of XIXth. century; a many foreign people felt in love with our well furnished homes and so they wanted the same renaissance furniture in their houses. The most experts wanted original pieces and this caused a real pillage of italian palaces and monasteries. Others were satisfied with rebuilt furniture. But before calling the antique dealers of that time with the word "forgers" we must remember the mania of the Neogothic and of the Renaissance that influenced the fashion of furnishing in America. Cupboard XVIth. century Detail before the restoration The pressing request of these forniture caused the total and partial rebuilding of the furniture. Not only foreigners preferred these kind of furniture but italians too: they liked to furnish their fabled villas with these married furniture. At that time "married" and rebuilt furniture were dominant even into museums'rooms. Something similiar, towards the english market, happened to the venetian furniture of XVIIIth. century. Not all the furniture sent to England in XIXth. century by a big venetian firm were certainly original. After the great war italian antique dealers bought in London auction sales those furniture which had left Venice in XIXth. century, and discovered many rebuilt furniture with some original one. The same thing happened to those Tuscan antique dealers went to America to buy florentine furniture in the '70s.