| Meaning | "Peace" — from Latin pax, Italian pace; one of the foundational words of Christian liturgy and Roman culture |
| Origin type | Nickname surname — from a personal quality, a greeting, or a devotional association |
| Language origin | Italian, from Latin pax / pacis; the word entered Italian directly and retained its full Latin meaning |
| Regional concentration | Sicily (especially the western provinces: Palermo, Trapani, Agrigento); Calabria; Campania; also present in Lazio and Abruzzo |
| Estimated frequency | Common across southern Italy; well-established in Italian-American communities, particularly in New York and New Jersey |
| Variants | Paci, Pacino, Pacifico, Paolini (unrelated), Lapace |
Pace is among the most immediately comprehensible of Italian surnames: it means, simply, peace. The word derives from the Latin pax — one of the most important words in the Roman political and religious vocabulary. The Pax Romana — the Roman Peace — was the enforced stability that the empire brought to the Mediterranean world for roughly two centuries from the reign of Augustus. The word carried enormous weight: it was written on temple inscriptions, carved into coins, and invoked in diplomatic correspondence across the ancient world. When Christianity became the religion of the Roman Empire in the 4th century, pax passed almost unchanged into Christian liturgy, where it appears in the Mass (Pax Domini sit semper vobiscum — "The peace of the Lord be always with you") and in the greeting exchanged between worshippers.
As a surname, Pace could have originated in several ways. It might be a nickname for a person known for a calm or peaceful temperament — a man described as "il pacifico" or simply "pace" in the way that surnames like Furioso, Allegro, and Forte originated as descriptors of personality. It might derive from a house sign — in medieval Italian cities, buildings were identified by painted symbols or words rather than street numbers, and "Pace" would have been a pious and natural choice. It might also reflect a devotional association with specific places or chapels named for the peace of God, which were common throughout southern Italy.
The surname Pace is particularly concentrated in western Sicily, where the interplay of Arab, Norman, and Spanish cultural influences created a naming environment in which abstract virtues and religious concepts frequently became hereditary surnames. During the Arab period (827–1072 CE), the Arabic word for peace — salaam — was in common use alongside the Latin-derived pace, and the cultural exchange between these traditions gave both words unusual salience in Sicilian daily life. The Norman rulers who followed the Arab emirs were deeply invested in projecting themselves as bringers of peace after the turbulence of conquest, which made peace-associated names and symbols particularly prestigious in the cultural environment of 12th-century Sicily.
Palermo, the Sicilian capital, and the western provinces of Trapani and Agrigento are the primary concentration areas for Pace families in historical records. The surname appears in Sicilian notarial documents from the 13th century onward and is documented in the records of the later Aragonese administration that governed Sicily from 1282. By the era of the great emigration (1880–1915), Pace was one of the most recognisable Sicilian surnames in the departing passenger manifests.
Pace families came to the United States primarily during the wave of Sicilian emigration that transformed American cities between 1880 and 1920. New York City — particularly Brooklyn and East Harlem — received the greatest number. The Pace surname appears in the records of Little Italy's mutual aid societies, in the Brooklyn Eagle's Italian-language coverage of community events, and in the New York State census records that tracked Italian immigrant settlement with unusual detail through the 1905 and 1915 state enumerations.
New Jersey — particularly Hudson County, Newark, and the industrial communities along the Passaic and Raritan rivers — became a secondary concentration area, as Sicilian workers moved from New York to the factories, shipyards, and construction sites of the New Jersey shore. Pennsylvania's mining regions also drew Pace families, where the Sicilian capacity for grueling physical labor found employment in the anthracite coal mines of the Lackawanna and Wyoming valleys.
The surname became internationally known through Al Pacino — born Alfredo James Pacino in New York City in 1940, to Sicilian parents from Corleone. Though Pacino's surname is a diminutive form (Pacino, "little Pace"), the connection illustrates the deep Sicilian roots of the Pace name family in Italian-American culture. Pacino's mother was from the Corleone district of Palermo province — one of the densest Pace surname areas in Sicily.
Pace is common enough across Sicily that identifying the specific comune is essential before any genealogical research can proceed. Passenger manifests from Ellis Island (1892–1957), searchable via the Ellis Island Foundation and Ancestry.com, record the specific Italian town of last residence — this is the critical first step. For Pace families from western Sicily, the Portale Antenati provides digitised civil records from 1866 for most Sicilian comuni, with Palermo and Agrigento provinces particularly well covered.
Pre-civil registration records for Sicily are held in diocesan archives; the Archivio Diocesano di Palermo and the Archivio Diocesano di Agrigento hold the most extensive collections for the western province Pace heartland. FamilySearch has microfilmed many Sicilian parish registers and provides free online access to a substantial portion of this material. Beware of spelling variations in American records: Pace is generally stable, but census enumerators occasionally recorded it as "Pase," "Pach," or "Peace."
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