1 Introduction  

The connection between the boxy/peanut morphology of galactic bulges and the presence of a bar is difficult to prove observationally. The main difficulty comes from the fact that the peculiar morphology can be seen only in almost edge-on systems.

Photometric evidences of a bar in boxy/peanut galaxies have been found only in a few cases, e.g. the barred galaxy NGC 4442 at intermediate inclination (Bettoni & Galletta 1994), the edge-on S0 galaxy NGC 1381 (de Carvalho & da Costa 1987), NGC 5170 (Dettmar & Barteldrees 1988), NGC 2654, and NGC 4469 (Jarvis 1986).

The kinematic observations offer further evidences of this connection. Kuijken & Merrifield (1995) obtained a characteristic "figure-of-eight'' rotation curve, which is likely the strong signature for the presence of a bar, for two peanut shape objects: NGC 5746 and NGC 5965. Other known cases of galaxies with these peculiar rotation curves are IC 5096 (Bureau & Freeman 1997), NGC 2683 (Merrifield 1996), NGC 5907 (Miller & Rubin 1995, and UGC 10205 (Vega et al. 1997).

Of course, given the small number of cases, new accurate photometric and spectroscopic observations are necessary for solving the peanut/bar connection.

Here we present a large data-set for the most representative object of this class: NGC 128, the standard peanut-shaped galaxy (Sandage 1961).

In the following sections we describe the peculiar morphology of NGC 128 and its group, present a 2D approximated model of the surface brightness of the galaxy (Sect. 2), give the results of long slit and CIGALE data (Sect. 3), show the surface brightness and color profiles of the galaxy at optical and near infrared wavelengths (Sect. 4), present the results of H$\alpha$ and NIR observations (Sect. 5 and Sect. 6), analyze the far infrared IRAS

data (Sect. 7), and briefly summarize the whole datasets (Sect. 8). The technical solutions adopted for the data reduction are given in the Appendix.