At the seat of furniture-making

MANZANO, Italy - The big chair to end all big chairs looms on the flat horizon in northeast Italy, and it's enough to make a Bay Stater homesick. After all, Gardner, Mass., reputedly started the madness back in 1905 when the town erected a 12-foot Mission chair at the railroad depot as a symbol of its signature industry. Thus began the "Big Chair" wars, as other furniture towns such as Thomasville, N.C., and Morristown, Tenn., built their own big seats. Even Old Avon Village in Connecticut got into the act with a relatively diminutive 9-foot rocking chair. Gardner's current effort is a 20-foot, 7-inch Heywood-Wakefield model.

But the Italians get the last word when it comes to furniture. The Guinness world record for the tallest chair in the world belongs to a 20-meter (65 1/2-foot) wooden chair standing inside a traffic circle on the outskirts of Manzano, a village in the Friuli region near the Slovenian border.