From BOOMERanG to B-Pol

Research on the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) has provided clean maps of the early Universe, depicting a hot plasma of photons and matter perturbed by adiabatic, almost scale-invariant density, fluctuations, in a Universe dominated by dark matter and dark energy. The focus is now shifting towards the study of the detailed properties of this radiation, namely high-accuracy polarization measurements (which can provide information on the very early Universe and on the hypothetical process of inflation) and fine-scale anisotropy observations (which will provide information on the formation of structures in the Universe, on dark matter and dark energy). We review the current status of the observations, and we describe shortly a few future experiments developed to deepen our understanding of cosmology using the CMB