Person re-identification consists in recognizing an individual that has already been observed over a network of cameras. It is a novel and challenging research topic in computer vision, for which no reference framework exists yet. Despite this, previous works share similar representations of human body based on part decomposition and the implicit concept of multiple instances. Building on these similarities, we propose a Multiple Component Matching (MCM) framework for the person re-identification problem, which is inspired by Multiple Component Learning, a framework recently proposed for object detection [3]. We show that previous techniques for person re-identification can be considered particular implementations of our MCM framework. We then present a novel person re-identification technique as a direct, simple implementation of our framework, focused in particular on robustness to varying lighting conditions, and show that it can attain state of the art performances.