Frank was born in Rosolini in 1889; the midwife saw him, hid him under the bed and ran away screaming. When his father Natale, a laborer, returns from working in the fields, he finds his wife Giovanna surrounded by women from half the village. They all cry: did the baby die? Worse, they tell him.
When they show him, he understands, and he feels chastised by God: the baby has three legs, an atrophic fourth foot behind the knee of the third leg, a total of 16 toes and two male genitalia (both fully functioning, he will tell the curious Frank as an adult).
At first the couple cannot cope, and “Ciccinieddu tri pieri” is raised by an aunt. But then they, too, accept bad luck, and after putting him through a slew of specialized examinations, they place him in a home for the disabled. The doctors say there is nothing they can do, the extra parts are what is left of a Siamese twin; impossible to remove them you risk paralysis or worse.
Frank deeply hates his body, but when he arrives at the nursing home he sees blind, deaf-mute, mutilated babies, he realizes that they have it worse. And everything changes for him. He learns to walk, run, jump rope, ride a bike, play soccer. And he has full control of his third leg, which is fully functional.
In 1898 he embarked with his parents for America. He is 9 years old. He is accompanied by an “uncle,” who is actually an old showman. It is he who proposes him to Ringling Brothers Circus. They cast him. And it's instant success. The Three-Legged Wonder is born.
Forty years followed with the most famous shows, from Barnum & Bailey to Buffalo Bill's Wild West. As time passed, Lentini attracted the crowd with his physical abnormalities, but won them over with the charm of a gentle, gentlemanly personality endowed with fine humor: his self-deprecating answers to constant questions about every even private detail of his life became proverbial.
In 1907 Frank married Theresa Murray, a very beautiful young actress, by whom he had four children, all perfectly healthy. After bidding farewell to the stage in 1952, he moved to Florida. He died in Jackson in 1966, at the age of 77.
