Italian form of Pascal, from Latin 'paschalis' meaning relating to Easter or Passover.
Pasquale is the Italian and southern-Italian-dialect form of Pascal, a name that carries within it the most sacred moment of the Christian calendar: it descends from Latin Paschalis, derived from the Greek Paskhā, which itself was borrowed from the Aramaic form of the Hebrew Pesach — Passover. To be named Pasquale is to be named for the passage from bondage to freedom, for the threshold between death and resurrection, for spring's return after the long winter. Few names carry so much theological weight so gracefully.
The name flourished in medieval Italy, particularly in communities where baptism at Easter was common and where children born or baptized at Pasqua — the Italian word for Easter — received the seasonal name as a devotional act. Two popes bore the name Paschal, as did a seventeenth-century Spanish mystic, Saint Paschal Baylón, patron of Eucharistic congresses. In southern Italy — Calabria, Campania, Sicily — Pasquale became one of the bedrock male names of Catholic family life, shortened affectionately to Pasqual, Pascalino, or simply Pat in the English-speaking diaspora.
In American immigrant communities of the early twentieth century, Pasquale was often Anglicized to Pat or Patrick — both losing and preserving something — but in recent decades Italian-American families have reclaimed the full form with pride. Pasquale today reads as deeply rooted, unmistakably southern Italian, and possessed of a resonant music: five syllables that move like a procession. It is the name of a man who knows where he comes from and is not in the least embarrassed about it.