The use of motorboats is strictly forbidden (exceptions being made for a few professional fishermen and the authorities), and a centralised sewer system has been built for all the bordering towns in order to avoid any spoiling of the water quality, making Bracciano one of the cleanest lakes in Italy.

In the last few years, the lake and its surroundings have been brought under further protection by the creation of a regional park, the Parco Regionale del complesso lacuale di Bracciano Martignano.

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.

"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 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 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.

In the period between the 16th and 17th centuries, a German historian and geographer documented in "Italia Antiqua" that the lake's calm waters occasionally revealed the submerged outlines of statues and edifices.