Not to be confused with the founder of the Dominican order by the same name, St. Dominic from Foligno was a saint of Umbrian origin, born in 951 at Capodacqua near Foligno. His cult is still being celebrated today at Cocullo in Abruzzo, with the “Festival of the snake charmers,” an event of great folkloristic and anthropologic interest, known and studied throughout the world.

Cocullo and few other places in Lazio and Abruzzo are exceptions in that the figure of St. Dominic is not greatly known throughout the rest of Italy. Even in Umbria, the fatherland to this miracle-working saint, Dominic is almost completely unknown by the majority of the Christian Faith.
Only at Capodacqua do they still celebrate the anniversary of his disappearance. It was January 22, 1031 when the saint died at Sora, and this funeral date is reason enough for festivities for the small centre of Foligno that honors their patron saint by displaying a relic, while the faithful recite an ancient psalm in Latin, an act of extreme historical and ethnomusicological interest. Venerated and called upon as the protector against bites from serpents and rabid dogs, Dominic was originally a humble Benedictine monk, educated from a very young age at a monastery in Foligno.
However, as a young man he preferred the hermetic lifestyle to that of the cenobitic, and thus decided to leave Foligno in the direction of the mountains of Lazio, Molise, and Abruzzo, where it has been passed down that he founded various monasteries and performed many miracles.
As already mentioned, the great interest in his person is linked to the traditional religious festivities that are carried out at Cocullo every first Thursday in May.
The absolute protagonists of the procession however are the snakes, captured by the inhabitants of the village in the weeks prior to the festival, offered to the saint with great devotion, and finally taken back to their holes at the conclusion to the festivities.
The spectacle is truly impressive and reaches its culmination in the moment when all the snake charmers place the captured reptiles on the statue of the saint, giving them the form of an enormous crown of snakes, that tangle around the head of the cult statue, and then slowly descend around its neck and arms. Many devotees who arrive from outside of the region as part of a pilgrimage ask for a favor, a healing, or simply the protection from viper bites.There are even those who invoke his help in preventing toothaches, as the saint is in fact regarded also as the protector against abnormalities of the teeth.
In considering the Old Testament, where the snake is considered to be the instigator of original sin, reptiles have always had a negative connotation, both in the Christian tradition and Hebrew. How come at Cocullo the snakes are instead considered sacred? In order to find an answer we must go back several centuries. We discover that in those lands, at a time when they were inhabited by the ancient Marsi people, a mother goddess named Angizia was worshipped, and it was to her that the principal sanctuary in the city of Anxa Angizia was dedicated along with the scared woods of Lucus Angitiae, named after a certain Luco of the Marsi.
She was an Italic divinity tied to fertility rites and to a myth telling of how it was through her that the Marsi tribe learned the art of phytotherapy that would cure the bites of venomous serpents. With the advent of Christianity, the cult of the goddess and the snakes was not immediately abandoned, even if slowly it was completely substituted by new Christian cults.
The rites of Cocullo could represent a transformation of the preexisting cult for Angizia. The people of Marsica could have exchanged in the place of the ancient mother goddess the new “Healer Saint,” in honor of the one who today makes such a grand impression at the festival of the snake charmers with a suggestive ritual that combines and fuses the sacred with the profane.