The recovery began a century ago, with the first excavations in the area of the ancient theater of Suessa, a powerful center of the Aurunca Pentapolis whose first evidence dates back to the 8th century BC.
In 313 or 312 BC it became a Roman colony and was a very prosperous city, in the middle of Campania felix, in the production area of the famous Falernum wine and in a favorable position connected with great communication and commercial arteries, Via Appia and Via Latina, two roads connecting Rome to the south.
A large theater was built to demonstrate the importance of Suessa. To make it in full Augustan age, in 2 BC. , as was customary, the natural inclination of a hill was exploited, but an earthquake occurring in the Antonine age left it abandoned for some time.
The structure that captured the attention of the archaeologist Amedeo Maiuri a hundred years ago was the one dating back to the 2nd century AD, when the sister-in-law of the emperor Hadrian, Matidia Minore, creator of a library and of an aqueduct for the city. The wealthy patrician spared no expense: for the construction were used precious colored marbles from various parts of the Mediterranean basin and white Carrara marbles. The second largest theater in Campania, with an auditorium of 110 meters in diameter capable of accommodating six to seven thousand spectators, boasted three orders of Ionic columns, 84 to be precise, and a scene forty meters long and twenty high. At the center of the colonnade there was the sacellum dedicated to the imperial cult. The northern entrance was adorned with a fresco that has come down to us. There are also numerous marble statues of divinities, including one of the nymph Aura, rare for the use of black and white marble, with the features of Matidia Minor.
After the recovery of the theater, completely abandoned and stripped of its precious marbles since the 4th century AD, a cryptoporticus with a still mysterious function also re-emerged. The presence of various inscriptions in Greek and Latin, even with Virgilian verses, has led to the hypothesis that it could be a gymnasium.
