We present a detailed discussion of the duality between dilaton gravity on AdS2 and open strings. The correspondence between the two theories is established using their symmetries and field theoretical, thermodynamic, and statistical arguments. We use the dual conformai field theory to describe two-dimensional black holes. In particular, all the semiclassical features of the black holes, including the entropy, have a natural interpretation in terms of the dual microscopic conformai dynamics. The previous results are discussed in the general framework of the anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory dualities.