working htaccess for titer 3 on local xampp

hello to all this community

i'm newbie on CI

i'm doing my first tests and so I'm follwoing the official codeigniter tutorial 

The welcome shows but the home and about pages are returning 404

The routes.php file has been configured in such a way that currently the index php is still in the url

So looks like now it is or it could be matter of the .htaccess file

Well 
How to setup the .htaccess on an xampp installation for the CodeIgniter 3 official tutorial?

Thank you for the working setup