  Galactic open clusters have been long recognized as one of the best tools to
investigate the chemical content of Galactic disk and its time evolution. In
the last decade, many efforts have been directed to chemically characterize the
old and intermediate age population; surprisingly, the chemical content of the
younger and close counterpart remains largely undetermined. In this paper we
present the abundance analysis of a sample of 15 G/K members of the young
pre-main sequence clusters IC 2602 and IC 2391. Along with IC 4665, these are
the first pre-main sequence clusters for which a detailed abundance
determination has been carried out so far. We analyzed high-resolution, high
S/N spectra acquired with different instruments (UVES and CASPEC at ESO, and
the echelle spectrograph at CTIO), using MOOG and equivalent width
measurements. Along with metallicity ([Fe/H]), we measured NaI, SiI, CaI, TiI
and TiII, and NiI abundances. Stars cooler than ~5500 show lower CaI, TiI, and
NaI than warmer stars. By determining TiII abundances, we show that, at least
for Ti, this effect is due to NLTE and over-ionization. We find average
metallicities [Fe/H] =0$\pm 0.01$ and [Fe/H]=0.01$\pm$ 0.02 for IC 2602 and IC
2391, respectively. All the [X/Fe] ratios show a solar composition; the
accurate measurements allow us to exclude the presence of star-to-star scatter
among the members.
