Early physics with top quarks at the 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 ($\le$10 fb${}^{-1}$).