  A mini-review devoted to some implications of the Hagedorn temperature for
black hole physics. The existence of a limiting temperature is a generic
feature of string models. The Hagedorn temperature was introduced first in the
context of hadronic physics. Nowadays, the emphasis is shifted to fundamental
strings which might be a necessary ingredient to obtain a consistent theory of
black holes. The point is that, in field theory, the local temperature close to
the horizon could be arbitrarily high, and this observation is difficult to
reconcile with the finiteness of the entropy of black holes. After preliminary
remarks, we review our recent attempt to evaluate the entropy of large black
holes in terms of fundamental strings. We also speculate on implications for
dynamics of large-N gauge theories arising within holographic models.
