Phenomenology of atmospheric neutrinos

The relevance of the data concerning upward--going muons for the solution of the atmospheric neutrino problem is stressed. In particular, their inclusion in the analysis confirms the goodness of the neutrino oscillation hypothesis and allows to exclude some alternative, exotic explanations such as neutrino decay, flavour changing neutral currents, violations of the equivalence principle (at least in their simplest forms), and also to discriminate, in principle, between different neutrino oscillation models (nu_mu <-> nu_tau versus nu_mu <-> nu_s), because of the difference in the matter effects.