Recent years have witnessed many exciting breakthroughs in neutrino physics. The detection of neutrino oscillations has proved that neutrinos are massive particles, but the assessment of their absolute mass scale is still an outstanding challenge in today particle physics and cosmology. Since low temperature detectors were first proposed for neutrino physics experiments in 1984, there has been tremendous technical progress: today this technique offers the high energy resolution and scalability required to perform competitive experiments challenging the lowest electron neutrino masses. This paper reviews the thirty-year effort aimed at realizing calorimetric measurements with sub-eV neutrino mass sensitivity using low temperature detectors.