By comparing the things that I learned as a student in Trieste with those that I’m teaching now in Marseille, I’ll tell of my journey through 20 years of facts, ideas and revolutions in cosmology. The quest for understanding how cosmic structures grow in time and cluster in space will serve as the basis for discussing recent spectacular and unexpected progresses in the study of the large scale structure of the universe. I will present facts that we dismissed as unrealistic and that we now take for granted, and I will illustrate the plot twists that changed our mind about things that once we considered as firmly established.

The goal is to show how technology and data have quickly transformed cosmology into a mature and empirically grounded physical science. Or rather how they are transforming it into the "science of the beyond", the branch of physics that deals with the study of whether there is something beyond the standard model of particles and beyond the standard model of gravity.