It is not uncommon in Italy, to hear that some aristocratic family had ancient silver melted down a few years ago, to make new and commonplace table spoons and forks. A lady from Siena who did this for a whim, kept one piece of the old silver service and was much astonished to learn later that this one piece alone would have fetched a sum sufficient to buy the coveted new set of table silver. In Italy, and more especially in Tuscany, the heavy taxes levied by Napoleon during the occupation forced many Florentine families to get rid of their silver-plate. As a matter of fact in Italy and elsewhere fine pieces are very rare nowadays. Yet a few years ago fickle fashion helped several people of good taste to form excellent collections, gatherings of artistic pieces that the art lover would seek in vain to-day. That was the happy time, when old-fashioned and yet artistic silver was hardly reckoned above the intrinsic value of the metal it contained. Fifty or so years ago it was not uncommon for one of the few collectors of artistic silver to come across some artistic beauty offered at so much a gramme, generally a very moderate figure slightly above the current price of the metal or at times at the actual value of the silver. To quote one instance out of many. In 1855, at the sale held after the death of Mlle. Mazencourt, some particularly fine flambeaux and other pieces of silver were sold at the price of 20 centimes a gramme. Such conditions explain how Baron Pichon, a collector of taste, was able to buy for the moderate sum of 300 francs an artistic bowl which was sold at his death for 14,000 francs, a price that could easily be surpassed nowadays. Unfortunately for the true collector, not only has old silver become fashionable, but it has become fashionable to be a collector of artistic silver, and thus real connoisseurship and ignorant greedy wealth have started the usual competition that inevitably creates an artificial standard of values, all too apt to generate faking. Faked silver, in fact, came at once triumphantly to the front in forms of all kinds, entirely new pieces successfully parading as old, were launched upon the market as well as plain old pieces decked out with the heavy ornamentation likely to suit the taste of the parvenu. There was also the usual piecemeal of different authentic parts, joined together more or less harmoniously by modern work, in fact all that the faker’s genius and versatility is able to produce. Silver marks, which on genuine pieces guarantee the quality of the metal and the authenticity of the piece as the work of a certain artist, factory or mint, can, unfortunately, be imitated with success. In fact the faker who is a good psychologist and knows that the neophyte amateur relies largely upon his knowledge of marks, generally expends great care upon the imitation of the various hall-marks.