Founded in 1873, the library of the École française de Rome is the largest French research library abroad.

With over 220,000 volumes, it spans two levels of the Palazzo Farnese and offers researchers 220 reading spaces, 180,000 volumes with open access, and nearly 2,200 research journal titles. A reserve collection houses the 20% of the collection that is not on open access, which is available upon request.

A collections policy, voted on by the Scientific Council of the École, outlines the main principles for the development of the library’s collections.

In 2018, the CollEx label (Collections of Excellence) was awarded to the collections on Roman antiquity and history of Italy.

Since 1989, the library has significantly expanded its collections in the field of legal history thanks to the deposit of the Edoardo Volterra library, which holds 10,000 editions (including a rare book collection of 1,615 volumes) and 16,000 offprints.