  The ATLAS and CMS experiments are now in their final installation phase and
will be soon ready to study the physics of proton-proton collisions at the
Large Hadron Collider. The LHC, by producing 2 $t\bar{t}$ events per second,
will provide more than 8 million top events a year at start-up. In this paper,
particular emphasis is given to the $t\bar{t}$ physics studies that can be
performed at the beginning of the LHC running, with a limited amount of
integrated luminosity ($\le$10 fb$^{-1}$).
