It is housed on the premises of the National Academy of Santa Cecilia in Rome.
Special attention is devoted to the Central and Southern regions — including Sicily and Sardinia — and to liturgical chants of the Mediterranean.
The collections include the research of Alan Lomax and Diego Carpitella, hundreds of documents recorded in 1954–55, as well as the results of the research of Ernesto De Martino and Carpitella in Southern Italy.
Along with classification of its materials (which, since 1996, has included Leo Levi's collection of Hebrew liturgical music), the Archive has issued a journal since 1993, entitled EM — Rivista degli Archivi di Etnomusicologia dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, which is currently published by Squilibri, Rome.
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