Historic Buildings of Connecticut

You can read much more about this house in my Substack piece “Frank Lenti and the Italians of Glastonbury.”

At 20 Lenti Terrace in Glastonbury is a substantial stone residence built into a hillside. The house‘s frame is said to have been put up by a dentist, who never completed the home because of the death of his wife. The house was completed in about 1909 by Bartholomew Carini, an immigrant from Northern Italy, who owned thousands of acres of land in town. He employed masonry construction, which is commonly found in vernacular Italian architecture. Another example of similar construction in Glastonbury is the ground level of the house on Main Street known as the “Glastonbury Villa.” Carini, a skilled hewer of oak and chestnut trees to make railroad ties, had arrived in about in Glastonbury in about 1890. He was soon able to purchase his own land and was soon joined by other Italian immigrants who began to grow fruit and establish orchards.

The house was later owned by Frank Lenti, another Italian immigrant, who first opened the famous Frank’s Restaurant in Hartford in 1933. After Lenti’s death in 1954, his wife eventually returned to Italy. For a number of years, the house was vacant and taxes on it went unpaid. The town was about to sell it in an auction in 1969, when Mrs. Lenti suddenly returned from Italy and arranged to sell it privately to pay the back taxes and the town’s cost in arranging the auction.

According to the Glastonbury’s Historic Resources Inventory page for the house, the date of 1909 is set in tesserae over its one chimney. The one-and-a-half house appears to have two-and-a-half stories when viewed from Chestnut Hill Road because it is built on a hill along a retaining wall with the basement exposed on the northeast side. The house’s front entrance is on that side, facing Lenti Terrace. The original floorplan has been altered, with a recessed side porch having been enclosed.