We reconsider transport experiments in strongly anisotropic superconducting cuprates and we find that universal Aslamazov-Larkin (AL) paraconductivity in two dimensions is surprisingly robust even in the underdoped regime below the pseudogap crossover temperature T * . We also establish that the underlying normal state resistivity in the pseudogap phase is (almost) linear in temperature, with all the deviations being quantitatively accounted by AL paraconductivity. The disappearence of paraconductivity is governed by the disappearence of gaussian pair fluctuations at an energy scale related to T * .PACS numbers: 74.25.Fy, 74.40.+k, 74.20.De Recent transport experiments 1,2,3 in superconducting cuprates have shown that the paraconductivity effects in the normal state close to the critical temperature T c are well described by the following expressions valid in two and three dimensions, respectively,where d is the distance between CuO 2 layers, ξ c0 is the coherence length along the direction perpendicular to the layers, ε ≡ log(T /T c ), and ε 0 ≡ log(T # /T c ). Here T # is a temperature scale which increases with decreasing doping and appears to follow the characteristic crossover temperature T * below which many different experiments in the cuprates detect a pseudogap opening 4 . The above expressions (and the experimental data that they fit well) display two remarkable features. First of all, close to T c , for small values of ε, they reproduce the AslamazovLarkin (AL) form of paraconductivity 5These expressions account well for the fluctuating regime near T c both in optimally and underdoped cuprates, with YBaCuO 6+x (YBCO) displaying three-dimensional (3D) fluctuations, whereas the other more anisotropic compounds (LSCO and BSCCO) have a two-dimensional (2D) behavior. The fact that the paraconductivity in strongly anisotropic (quasi-2D) underdoped cuprates is described by "traditional" AL fluctuations is at odds with the widespread idea that below the pseudogap formation temperature T * particle-particle pairs are formed, which only become phase-coherent at the lower superconducting transition temperature T c . According to this picture, below the temperature of pair formation the fluctuations would be vortex-driven and should display a KosterlizThouless behavior, with exponential temperature dependences. On the contrary, it seems a well-established experimental fact that the superconducting fluctuations in the more 2D-like systems (essentially all, but the YBCO) display AL power-law behaviors in ε 6,7,8,9,10,11 . Remarkably, in D = 2 the AL theory of paraconductivity does not allow for any fitting parameter besides the experimentally well accessible distance between the 2D layers, which translates the 2D conductivity, with dimensions Ω −1 , in a 3D conductivity with dimensions Ω −1 m −1 . Therefore the AL paraconductive behavior observed near T c strikingly shows that the establishment of superconducting phase coherence in these materials is not due to a simple condensation of preformed pairs. This by n...