FILIPPO Alison, the architect, teacher and renowned Italian designer who helped to enhance the international reputation of Charles Rennie Mackintosh has died, aged 86.

Mr Alison, one of the most prominent figures of culture and design in Italy, passed away at his home in Posillip, a residential quarter of Naples.

During his long career Mr Alison, an architect by training, restored pieces designed by other great designers including Mackintosh, lauded as Scotland's most influential architects and desiginers.

In particular he reconstructed 20 Mackintosh chairs, originally designed from 1897 to 1910 and subsequently exhibited in New York.

He worked for an old-line, Italian-based furniture manufacturer named Cassina, and came up with the idea of a vast reproduction programme that resurrected not just Mackintosh's designs, but those from other world-renowned architects including Frank Lloyd Wright and Charles-�douard Jeanneret-Gris, better known as Le Corbusier.

In 1974, Alison sold Cassina his grand plan, and the manufacturer now boasts its distinguished Masters Architects collection of reproduction furniture that is true to the original design, and certified as such.

It was a labour of love rather than a commercial venture.

He once said: "We're looking back at designs from the '20s, '30s, early 1900s and rethinking them.The meaning of doing this project was to rediscover some value that has been abandoned during the historical process."

Abitare, the monthly Italian magazine devoted to architecture, interiors and design paid its tribute to the "Neapolitan with a Scottish surname".

"He is responsible for the most cultured and farsighted operation of faithful reproduction linked to the design of the last century, the collection called I Maestri.

"The furniture of Le Corbusier, Asplund, Rietveld, Wright and Mackintosh has survived the ravages of time thanks to the ideology of historical reconstruction that Alison began to develop at the end of the sixties."

Murray Grigor, the Scots filmmaker, writer and exhibition curator, whose first movie, the documentary Mackintosh, in 1968, about the then neglected Scottish architect, said Mr Alison revived Mackintosh's international reputation "more than anyone".

He said Alison's "spectacular exhibition"of Mackintosh reproductions when transferred to New York "was such a success that it practically launched Mackintosh as a designer of the Seventies."