LUIGI DE CANIO is walking us through the defining moments of his managerial career. We start out at Udine, and a first taste of European action for the city’s football team. We move 800 miles south to Reggio, and an improbable escape from relegation for one of Serie A’s smallest fry. Having traversed Italy from top to toe, De Canio tugs us back to the middle with a tale that gives a glimpse of his own core.

We’re now in the Tuscan heartlands of Siena, scene of his last senior job and the following instructive vignette. “I took a walk there one Sunday,” he says. “I was with a friend, a heart surgeon. He’s a guy who spends his life saving other lives. I’m a football manager, not even a famous one. But people were asking me for autographs, not him. I found that too strange.”

The story reveals a lot of what, and who, he is - a quiet, unassuming man whose acute self-awareness takes its bearings from an upbringing in the austerity of Italy’s south. What it doesn’t explain is what he’s doing at Queens Park Rangers, new home of the rich, flaunter of ambition, where egos and expectation have combined noisily since September.

It was then that Formula One tycoons Flavio Briatore and Bernie Ecclestone combined their loose change to come up with the £14m necessary to buy a controlling stake in the club and cover its debt. A third headline act squeezed in two months later in the shape of Lakshmi Mittal, the Indian steel magnate whom Briatore persuaded to take on 20% of his shares. Mittal, valued at £19.25 billion, is the richest man in Britain and the fifth richest in the world.

Playthings are only fun when they work, of course. For Rangers, under the designs Briatore unveiled when he arrived and reiterated last week, that means reaching the Premier League by 2011 and Europe the following season. The natural assumption is that the chasm between the realities of the present and the imagined future utopia will be filled with wads of the owners’ banknotes. Collectively, after all, they are worth £22 billion.

Listen to De Canio, however, and you’ll be told that such simplistic thinking distorts what the money men are in this for. The 50-year-old talks not of flourishes but of foundations. The nine January signings he has already made he describes as a necessary exception, aimed simply at securing their Championship survival.

“Every project has its road and its time,” he says. “QPR are aiming high, but what can you do without a base? I could ask the owners for Ronaldo, Tevez, Kaka, but if there’s no plan or structure underpinning things, how does it work? It would be easy for us to get results but just as easy to fall on our faces very fast. If a structure isn’t solid it crumbles. We need to grow incrementally.”

And so the secondments agreed by De Canio and Gianni Palladini, the club’s chairman-cum-general manager, have been of the type of centre-backs Matthew Connolly and Fitz Hall. The manager believes he is practising a form of positive discrimination. “The place needs to be English, or at least to understand English football, because England is where we are and where we must succeed,” he says. “These players can help us to compete better in this division, then think about the next target. On that base we’ll be able to layer on Brazilians, Americans, who knows. But you need the base first. Until we have it, dreaming is not allowed.” His one worry is that the first step in QPR’s recovery might be his last. Rumours persist that Briatore and Co fancy a bigger, or simply louder, name.

In the meantime, he spends his spare time “doing the tourist thing” before returning to his home to devour the food and wine parcels sent over from his native Matera, where his wife and daughter have remained. “I’m not lonely,” he says. “I’m enjoying myself. I feel an important part of an important project. I want to make this club work again.” And prove he is the man for the job.