Dominic was born around 951 in Foligno, Umbria, and educated at the Benedictine Abbey of San Silvestro in Foligno. Around 970 he was ordained priest, and around 980 he undertook the ascetic-hermit life in the central Italian Apennines — founding multiple monastic communities across the Marche, Umbria, Lazio, and Abruzzo regions.
His principal monastic foundations included: the Abbey of San Silvestro at Pizzoli (near L'Aquila), the Abbey of San Bartolomeo at Trisulti, the Abbey of Santa Maria at Carpineto Romano, and the principal Abbey of San Domenico at Sora in Lazio — where he settled in the last years of his life.
He was renowned in the central-Italian Apennine peasant tradition for his miraculous protection against snake-bite — the patronage that has produced the continuing Festa dei Serpari (Festival of the Snake-Catchers) at Cocullo in Abruzzo, one of the most distinctive religious-folk festivals in the world: the first Thursday in May, snake-catchers (serpari) drape the statue of St. Dominic of Sora with live, non-venomous snakes and carry the snake-covered statue through the mountain village in the annual procession, pre-Christian Italic-Apennine snake-cult traditions Christianized through the St. Dominic patronage.
He died at his Abbey of Sora on January 22, 1031, having founded or reformed dozens of central-Italian monastic communities. The Abbey of San Domenico at Sora survives in continuous Catholic use as the principal Sora pilgrim destination.