Suessula is a pre-Roman settlement situated on the eastern edge of the Campanian plain, at the entrance to the Caudina valley. It stands on a low tufa rise that slopes east to west and is bordered to the north and south by paleo-riverbeds that were formed by the springs at the feet of the Cancello hills. Since 1996, Salerno University, in collaboration with the Archaeological Superintendency of Campania, has been carrying out research in the ancient settlement and its territory. Excavations in the city have identified the Roman forum where excavations in the early 1900s had already exposed a sector.

The forum lies in the central part of the city, up against a low rise on which the theatre stands, now incorporated into the Casina Spinelli, an important late 18th century hunting lodge. Significant evidence for the Roman phase and for the late antique and medieval transformations was documented in the public area. The forum’s first phase dates to the transition between the 2nd and 1st centuries B.C., in a period to which the written sources attribute the deduction of the Sullan colony (_Lib._ Col., 1, 237). The research undertaken between 1999 and 2007 uncovered the north-eastern corner of the forum piazza, bordered by a road built of limestone basoli, and by two porticoes. To the north stood a rectangular aula and a large temple, probably the basilica and capitolium.

Part of the foundations of the temple’s eastern perimeter wall, of the front facing onto the forum and an inner wall running parallel to it at a distance of c. 8 m, which may be the south wall of the cella, were uncovered. In July 2015, the Salerno University’s Department of Heritage and Cultural Science, using its own funding and with support from Acerra town council, began a new campaign of excavations. The aim was to identify the temple perimeter and to check and interpret the stratigraphy documenting the transformations in the forum area. Three trenches were opened that revealed the northern edge of the temple and part of a portico to the west of it. The monuments had been repeatedly robbed both in the early medieval period and more recently through illegal excavating and agricultural activity.

These activities, as seen in 2007, had partially compromised the conservation of the temple’s standing structures thus making it harder to identify the structural elements and decorative elements. The area in which the portico stood was transformed in the early medieval period by the systematic dismantling of the facing structures. Several dumps of materials datable to the mid 1st century A.D. were found to the rear of the temple and relate to the building’s use. These dumps document the destruction and a later and possible restoration of the structures following a traumatic event (earthquake?) that also affected other areas of the forum.