Early physics with top quarks at LHC

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 ( <=10 fb-1).