Sinuessa (Greek: Σινούεσσα or Σινόεσσα) was a city of Latium, in the more extended sense of the name, situated on the Tyrrhenian Sea, about 10 km north of the mouth of the Volturno River (the ancient Vulturnus).
[3] It subsequently endeavored, in common with Minturnae and other coloniae maritimae, to establish its exemption from furnishing military levies; but this was overruled, while there was an enemy with an army in Italy.
[4] Its position on the Appian Way doubtless contributed greatly to the prosperity of Sinuessa; for the same reason it is frequently incidentally mentioned by Cicero, and we learn that Julius Caesar halted there for a night on his way from Brundisium to Rome, in 49 BCE.
It received a body of military colonists, apparently under the Triumvirate,[7] but did not retain the rank of a colonia and is termed by Pliny as well as the Liber Coloniarum only an oppidum, or ordinary municipal town.
[9] At an earlier period indeed Polybius reckoned it a town of Campania, and Ptolemy follows the same classification, as he makes the Liris the southern limit of Latium;[10] but the division adopted by Strabo and Pliny is probably the most correct.
The abandonment of the countries, the transformation in forests and fenlands of the fertile lands, the barbaric raids of the Vandals and the Saracens finished the deterioration of the zone that already started to suffer some consequences of the bradyseism that subsequently will submerge the ancient Sinuessanus habitat.
The inhabitants settled in the surroundings of Petrino Mount and founded a little urban agglomeration all around Montis dragonis rock of which the Longobards were owners from 840 to 1058 as it was a very strategic and impregnable place.
The village of Baia Azzurra - Levagnole is 12.56 kilometers from the same town of Sessa Aurunca to which it belongs).The most important are those of an aqueduct, and of an edifice which appears to have been a triumphal arch; but the whole plain is covered with fragments of ancient buildings.
They are already mentioned by Livy as early as the Second Punic War; and though their fame was eclipsed at a later period by those of Baiae and other fashionable watering-places, they still continued in use under the Empire, and were resorted to among others by the emperor Claudius.