The practice ground at Formello, where Lazio do their day-to-day work at a good hour's distance from the centre of Rome, can seem a slightly forbidding place. Its facilities are good, but its buildings stark, with rather small windows in the offices.
When Sven-Goran Eriksson worked there as coach and Roberto Mancini was one of his many elite players, they would have reflected on the difference in environment from their previous, shared office.
In the 1990s, Sampdoria had as its administrative base a beautiful, ornate, high-ceilinged building near the middle of Genoa.
There is an element of the starkly functional and of the romantically flamboyant in the characters of both men, who as rival managers will meet in the FA Cup today. Mancini's Manchester City, as ambitious, wealthy and light blue as was Eriksson's Lazio 10 or so years ago, are sometimes criticised for playing a conservative brand of football, very unlike the way Mancini was as a footballer.
Some of Eriksson's teams - notably his England - have suffered similar accusations of rigidness. But you will never catch the 62-year-old Swede or the 45-year-old Italian caricaturing one another as austere or frivolous. They know each other far too well, too deeply, for that.
The relationship began at Sampdoria, where Mancini spent most of his playing career and Eriksson was the coach for five years.
When the guru went to Lazio, he asked Mancini to come, too, to be his creative thinker on the pitch, constructing bridges between midfield and what was usually a quick centre-forward.
Mancini had been the captain when Sampdoria, champions of Italy in 1991 and European Cup finalists a year later, first employed Eriksson. By the time the Swede left, he was a trusted lieutenant.
As a player, Mancini contributed to Lazio's Italian title in May 2000. As player-coach, to which Eriksson promoted him, he had the ear of the dressing room.
"Eriksson and I worked together for nine years," Mancini once said.
"I learnt a lot from him. But we've got different characters. He's an 'Italo-Swede', if you like, I'm just Italian. I'm more instinctive; he's more calculating and thinks about things that bit more. If I think of something, I tend to do it. But those years we were together have served me well."
The debt was intellectual, and it was also practical. When Eriksson left Lazio in 2001, Mancini hoped he would inherit the senior coaching job.
Instead, the former Italy coach Dino Zoff was invited to do it, and when Zoff failed to pick up Eriksson's baton, Alberto Zaccheroni would be taken on. He fell short of expectation, too.
By the time Lazio eventually called Mancini, Eriksson had done him another good turn by arranging a brief adventure in English football, playing for Leicester City, then under the guidance of Peter Taylor, Eriksson's part-time deputy with the England side.
It was no more than a cameo, but it left Mancini, then a veteran, with an appetite for the Premier League.
"Leicester made me feel sorry that I hadn't gone over to play in England earlier," he said.
And so various threads entwine today. Leicester now have Eriksson in charge, and are underdogs against a City whom Eriksson managed for a season, 2007-08.
"It's the first time one of my teams has played against one of Sven's," Mancini said.
"And that will be very interesting. For me, Sven is a fantastic coach and fantastic man, and he is like my brother."
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