STIA, Italy — The road from Faella, down in the Arno valley, winds up and up into the hills, beyond the vineyards, with their military precision, beyond the tangled olive groves and into the woods, thick and dark and untamed. At Consuma, the highest point of the pass, the view stretches all the way west to Chianti; Arezzo lies south, Florence north.

Consuma is not where the journey ends. It takes an hour, and countless tight hairpins shaded by slender cypresses, before the road descends into the village of Stia, its terra-cotta roofs nestled in an ocean of green, a little Tuscan idyll nestled in the valley. The soccer field, overlooking the river and screened by a chain-link fence, is the first thing you see as you arrive.

Most days, for more than a year, Maurizio Sarri made the trip twice. Usually, he would do it after a full day at work, leaving Faella at 5 p.m. and not returning home until late. Often, he would car share with a handful of others based in the sleepy cluster of towns that line the Arno valley, to help spread the fuel costs. Every other week, he would do it on Saturday for a brief training session, drive back, and then do it all over again on Sunday, game day. Stia, then, was the end of his journey. In hindsight, it is where it all began.

On Saturday, Sarri will take charge of Chelsea for the first time in the Premier League. A 59-year-old Italian, he is the 13th managerial appointment of Roman Abramovich’s impatient tenure at Stamford Bridge, and he is hardly the first to lack a garlanded playing career: of his predecessors, much the same could be said of José Mourinho, Andre Villas-Boas and Rafael Benítez.