The founding is recorded by Diodorus Siculus . In 282 BC , Phintias, tyrant of Akragas, destroyed Gela and moved its surviving inhabitants to a new city built on the sea and named Finziade — not a confident colonial expansion like the archaic apoikiai , but the political calculation of one man. It is generally taken as the last act of the great Greek colonial age in Sicily.

Diodorus describes its circuit wall, a notably large agora and its temples. The city survived for centuries and reappears in Cicero's Verrines among the towns of Roman Sicily plundered by the governor Verres. Its exact site remains uncertain; archaeological work on Monte Sant'Angelo , within Licata's territory, was reactivated in 2024 and continues to recover it. Phoenicians and Greeks had used this coast before Phintias, and under Rome it became an important commercial emporium .

The modern name is medieval. Between the eleventh and twelfth centuries the Norman sources give Leocata or Licata , frequently alongside Olimpiada . Its position made it central, and the harbour did the rest.

Between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the town transformed. Elegant palaces went up along the Cassaro , and the port consolidated its role as a Mediterranean hinge — the celebrated Regio Caricatore , the royal loading-place for grain. Sicily's grain left the island through a small number of licensed caricatori , and Licata was one of them. In the nineteenth century the same harbour served the interior's mineral economy, when the sulphur district behind it — Racalmuto, Serradifalco, Montedoro, the Caltanissetta mines — needed a coastal outlet.

The town's other decisive date is modern. American intelligence identified this harbour as the ideal landing point for the large naval units of the Seventh Army coming from North Africa, and it became the principal objective of the Allied offensive on the south-central coast. On the morning of 10 July 1943 , in an action pressed from east and west, the port was taken by late morning — the beginning of the advance that led to the liberation of the island. The Allied designation for this stretch of shore was the Joss landing area, and the name is still used locally.