The patron saint of Acate is Saint Blaise, celebrated on 3 February. Until 1938 the town was called Biscari, a name of untraceable origin, first recorded in 1299 with its grant as a fief by Charles II of Anjou to Gualtiero Pantaleone; the change to the current name, proposed by local scholar Carlo Addario, refers to the ancient name of the nearby Dirillo river, called by the Romans Acates amnis and by the Greeks Acathes, tied to finds of agate stones along its course.
Some historians have proposed identifying Acate's territory with the ancient Bidis, mentioned by Pliny the Elder as a centre of south-eastern Sicily, although the identification remains a matter of scholarly debate. Between the late 14th and the second half of the 15th century, the fief passed through several families, including the Lamia and the Serra, until reaching the Lo Castello family, who brought a decisive turn to the settlement's history: the mother church, dedicated to Saint Nicholas of Bari, was later restored together with the castle and the conventual buildings as part of the Baroque reconstruction of eastern Sicily that followed the 1693 earthquake.
