Graphene, a one atom thick layer of carbon, the supposedly ideal Dirac material, has been under the radar of theorists and experimentalist for many decades. Although novel physical properties were envisioned, graphene, as any other 2D material, was presumed not to exist in its free state because of long wavelength fluctuations will easily destroy purely 2D membranes. The recent success in isolating a single sheet of graphene has certainly challenged this view. In this talk I will present our experimental work in this field using a combination of spectroscopic and microscopy tools. I’ll present experimental evidence of what drives the stability of a graphene membrane and show comparison between exfoliated and epitaxial graphene. I will then discuss the nature of fermions in graphene sheets and how their peculiar electronic structure can be tuned by engineering small terraces of graphene down to nm size, where the physics gets dominated by quantum confinement. The implications of our study on the properties of Dirac materials and their potential role for applications are discussed