Abstract
Despite its importance as the only galactic spheroid fully resolved in stars, our knowledge of the Galactic bulge has been historically quite poor. This was mainly due to the stellar crowding, to the heavy interstellar absorption in the plane, and to the foreground disk contamination. However, in the last few years, with the use of near IR detectors, 8 meter class (or space based) telescopes, and the advent of multi-object spectrographs, we have learnt how to minimize the above effects. This paper reviews the basic properties (structural parameters, age, chemical content) of the Galactic bulge, as determined in the last 4-5 years.
