Lake Bracciano

At La Marmotta,[3] a few hundred meters outside the village of Anguillara Sabazia, remains of an Early Neolithic lakeshore village, datable 5700 BC have been found, in works overseen by Maria Antonietta Fugazzola Delpino, director of the Pigorini National Museum of Prehistory and Ethnography in Rome, and president of the Italian Institute of Prehistory and Protohistory. Thick oak pilings driven more than two meters into the subsoil have survived, thanks to anoxic lake-bottom sediments; dendrochronology dates the settlement very accurately, for local tree-ring sequences have already been thoroughly established. The oldest post-Fugazzola Delpino has discovered at La Marmotta dates from around 5,690 BC, but she thinks ongoing work may yet reveal the village to have been born a century or so earlier. She is more certain of when it died: within a decade or so of 5230 BC. "Since the sixth millennium BC, as the climate has grown wetter, the water level in Lake Bracciano has risen more than 25 feet (8 m), and so the ruins of the Neolithic lakeshore village are now buried in bottom mud 400 yards (370 m) offshore" (Delpino 2002).

The strongest evidence that the Marmottans came from far away, probably originally making their way along the Arrone to its source in Lake Bracciano, is simply that their culture was advanced. In the region around Lake Bracciano, according to Fugazzola Delpino, there is no sign of any but hunter-gatherers before the settlement was built at La Marmotta. The builders of the village had at their disposal, from the start, the entire "Neolithic package": domesticated animals and plants, ceramic pots, polished stone tools, just as though they had unloaded all those things from their boats.

They kept sheep and goats; they brought pigs and cows with them too, and two breeds of dog, and they planted a wide variety of crops— wheat and barley — and collected others in the woods. "They had everything", says Fugazzola, "They ate grains, vegetables, and also lots of fruit – apples, plums, raspberries, strawberries" Especially in winter they supplemented their diet with acorns, which they stored in large ceramic jars. They cultivated flax to make linen. They planted opium poppies" One of their boats has been recovered. A team of Czech archaeologists built a copy of the boat and sailed it 500 miles (800 km) along the Mediterranean coast to test its seaworthiness.

The area around the lake was always sparsely populated, but by the late Republic many waterfront villas had been built. The rich volcanic soil and the beautiful environment and views attracted rich patricians from Rome to build elaborate villae rusticae.[4] Among these, Domitian’s villa with thermal spa at Vicarello was the ultimate example.

However around the mid-1st century AD an environmental disaster occurred; the lake's water level rose, flooding the shore and many of the villas there more or less permanently.[5]