The research activity of the Florentine unit, PI of ActAr, has as its object an important archive kept at the Arezzo City Library: the so-called ‘Fondo Diego Carpitella’. The fund is not the personal archive of the eminent scholar, the ‘founding father’ of Ethnomusicology in Italy, but only the part concerning a long investigation he conducted between 1965 and 1967 for the Consortium for Musical Activities in the Province of Arezzo (CAMPA): in other words, an extensive documentation campaign conducted by Carpitella together with a local team and with the technological support of RAI, which focused on the musical traditions of the Arezzo countryside, touching on numerous localities in the province.

The archive represents, even today, an impressive and paradigmatic testimony to the research procedures implemented in studies concerning local musical traditions, during the 1960s, in Italy, and also in Europe; This is particularly relevant with reference to the methods of audio documentation, the relationships between ‘insiders’ (the informants and performers who were the subject of the sound recordings) and ‘outsiders’ (the scholars engaged in the field, in the studio and in the archives), the relationships between research and administrative bodies and operators, and the participation of national institutions (RAI, CNSMP of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia).

It is the intention of the research unit of the University of Florence to study the archive and promote it according to multiform perspectives, also and above all with a view to its ‘restitution’ to citizenship. In fact, in the sixty years that separate Carpitella's undertaking from the present, powerful social, economic and cultural transformations have taken place in the territories touched by that research campaign, so much so that it is possible to hypothesise that, in these same territories, the memory of the musical expressions documented by Carpitella is today blurred, if not completely lost. Through the dissemination of this heritage, it will therefore be possible to reactivate memories, both cultural and affective, among the portions of citizenship settled in the territory for several generations, as well as to transmit significant segments of local traditions to new communities of users (young people, new inhabitants).