With over 215,000 volumes, the EFR Library is the biggest French research library outside the French territory.  

The Library is spread over three floors at the Palazzo Farnese: the 2nd floor, the mezzanino, and the 3rd floor.

It offers 220 reading places, 180,000 volumes in free access, about 2,200 periodical titles. 30,000 volumes, kept in a warehouse in the basement of the building, can be consulted on request.

The growth of the collections has accompanied that of the École since 1873. The main fields of specialization are:

• Archaeology of the Central Mediterranean region
• History of Roman civilisation
• History of Italy
• History of the Church

The acquisitions policy is defined as one of the School’s primary missions:

The École française de Rome develops, in Rome and Italy, and in the countries of Southeast Europe bordering the Adriatic Sea, research programmes in the fields of archaeology, history, and other human and social sciences, from Prehistoric times to the present.
 (Article 3, II -Décret No. 2011-164 of February 10, 2011 on French Schools Abroad (NOR: ESRS1014943D).

A Collection policy statement (French version) , sanctioned by the Scientific Council of the École française de Rome, defines the overall development policy applied to the Library’s collections.

The CollEx quality label (Collections d'excellence) has been attributed for five years (2018-2022) to the Roman Antiquity and Italian History collections.

In 1989, the Library has considerably increased its collections in the field of History of Law thanks to the Edoardo Volterra legacy, which consists in 10,000 books (including a collection of 1,615 ancient volumes), and 16,000 separate titles.