Roch (Rocco in Italian, Rock in English, Roque in Iberian usage) was born in Montpellier to a wealthy family — his father was governor of the city — and is said to have been marked from birth with a red cross on his breast. Orphaned at twenty, he distributed his fortune to the poor and set out as a pilgrim for Rome dressed in the simple grey-and-black tabard of a medieval pilgrim with the scallop-shell badge.
Reaching Italy at the beginning of the second great wave of the Black Death, he stopped at every plague-stricken town along the road — Acquapendente, Cesena, Mantua, Modena, Parma — and worked in the lazarettos curing the sick by the sign of the cross. He fell ill himself at Piacenza with a buboe on his thigh, crawled into the woods to die, and was kept alive (the central legend) by a dog named Rocchino belonging to a nobleman of Sarmato; the dog brought him bread daily from his master's table and licked his wound until it healed.
Returning to Montpellier in poverty, gaunt, and unrecognizable, he was arrested as a spy and imprisoned by his own uncle (the new governor). He died in prison — variously dated 1378 or 1379 — and was identified only at his death by the cross-shaped birthmark on his chest. His cult exploded throughout fourteenth-century Italy as plague waves followed plague waves; the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice (founded 1478) commissioned Tintoretto to fresco the entire chapter-house cycle on his life in 1564–87, one of the supreme cycles of European religious painting. He is the chief lay patron against plague and pestilence in the Latin tradition.