The Aci territory carries an old story before it carries a documented one: the myth of the shepherd Acis and the nymph Galatea , attached to the coast below Etna, and a tradition of ancient settlement on this shore.

The medieval town suffered badly — destruction during the War of the Vespers, then the plague of 1466 — and the votive church raised afterward, originally to San Sebastiano and later rededicated to Sant'Antonio di Padova, still keeps its 1475 portal in Lombard Gothic. It is the one surviving fragment of the older town. In that period the settlement belonged to the sacramental parish of Aci San Filippo, a reminder of how recently these places were one.

By the sixteenth century a strong merchant class had formed here, and the Aragonese crown favoured the town as a counterweight to a frequently rebellious Catania. In 1680 the bishop of Catania proclaimed Santa Venera patron. In 1642 Philip IV granted the name it still carries.

Then came 11 January 1693 , when the Val di Noto earthquake devastated south-eastern Sicily. Acireale was heavily damaged. A Sicilian verse remembered locally puts it plainly: at Aci they danced without music, some beneath the stones, some beneath the walls, some calling on mercy. The rebuilding that followed is why the town looks as it does — the Duomo, the Basilica di San Sebastiano, the Basilica dei Santi Pietro e Paolo, all raised or completed in the Baroque of the reconstruction.

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were prosperous. The Accademia degli Zelanti made Acireale a genuine centre of learning; the fair, inherited from Aci Catena, became one of the largest in Sicily until the town lost its fair rights in 1818 ; the town was a principal centre of the 1848 risings; and in 1873 the opening of the Santa Venera thermal establishment and the adjoining Grand Hotel des Bains made it a spa destination. After unification it became capital of the Circondario di Acireale — an administrative status worth knowing, because it means Acireale generated and held records for a district wider than itself.