Watford have hired three Italian managers since the Pozzo family took over in the summer of 2012 – Gianfranco Zola, Giuseppe Sannino and the current head coach Walter Mazzarri – and two of them are featured in the latest volume of Tales from the Vicarage.

Ciro Scognamiglio, a journalist with sports paper La Gazzetta dello Sport, and a Napoli fan profiles Mazzarri and tells the story of how he captivated the hearts of the fans in Naples.

And Paolo Tomaselli, who writes for Corriere della Sera, has interviewed Sannino, who took over from Zola, steadied a rocking ship and, it could be argued, laid the foundations for eventual promotion in 2015.

Sannino fell in love with English football and hopes the feeling was mutual at Watford – “they fell in love with the wild madman on the bench.”

He remembers the final day of the 2013/14 season, when Watford completed the season with a whimper, going down 4-1 to Huddersfield Town.

“I had my head down and was saying ‘sorry, sorry’, because we had lost 4-1 and I was ashamed of the result,” Sannino says. ‘Afterwards I was thinking ‘How can we go out on to the pitch and face our fans?’ But they were there in the stands and they [the Watford supporters] were signalling to me to hold my head up.”

Sannino came in when the team’s early season momentum under Zola had evaporated. He was not fluent in English but he was determined to throw himself into the challenge and wanted to make himself understood even though the language barrier made that tricky at times.

“I could have said I’m only speaking Italian and trusted myself to the translator but I didn’t. I wanted to touch the players’ hearts – to use the tone of my voice to make them understand what I wanted them to do. I didn’t always succeed, particularly on the psychological level, because of the language problems.”

When he first arrived at Watford, no one knew him, including the QPR boss Harry Redknapp. “Before the match, knowing that I was bald but not knowing me personally, Redknapp went to shake the hand of De Toffol, the goalkeeping coach,” Sannino says.

But he quickly made an impression, not least because of his eccentric touchline manner. He wanted to work in what he calls ‘the Italian way’, which he describes as “very fussy on certain things and we don’t put up with poor tactical concentration,” but he found that “English players, if you try to explain too many things to them, they tell you it’s boring.”

The start of the next season couldn’t have gone much better for Sannino. Watford lost at Norwich but won the other four of their opening five league games and were second in the table when Sannino decided to leave. “Gino Pozzo didn’t want me to go,” he says, “but I couldn’t see the necessary composure around me. People didn’t understand my choice but I had to think of the good of the team.”

The season may only have been a few weeks old, and Watford tried Oscar Garcia and Billy McKinlay before settling on Slavisa Jokanovic and achieving promotion. Sannino, back in Italy, followed the team’s results on a weekly basis and was willing them to finish the job. “I know I gave Watford a lot but I got back even more from so many people, which I will always carry in my heart. If I had a second life, I would like to go back.”

Tales from the Vicarage volume 5, as well as the rest of the books in the series, is available from The Hornets Shop, Waterstones, Amazon and talesfrom.com/watford