Rome is coming back to life after the August exodus. For weeks, neighbourhoods have been deathly quiet, shop shutters down and roads empty as the Romans took their annual sojourn to the sea or mountains to escape the suffocating summer heat.

It’s a strange time of year, almost like the ancient city is yawning and stretching as it sleepily raises itself from hibernation.

For Lazio, though, the final day of August was not a time for settling back in. It was a time for action – as made perfectly clear by a large banner in the Curva Nord before kick-off against Verona on Sunday.

“Don’t take a backwards step, don’t even concede one metre,” it said.

Things were tense for good reason. A summer transfer ban left supporters furious and Maurizio Sarri facing a far tougher job than he signed up for.

A 10,000-strong fan march was held in July through the Roman Forums to demand that Claudio Lotito sell up, and the unpopular owner was the target of repeated chants and banners before and during the game – despite deciding not to turn up.

It wasn’t just off-pitch matters that had sparked fan frustration. Lazio came into Sunday’s clash on the back of a dreadful performance in a 2-0 defeat by Como where Sarri had said they produced “Serie C level” statistics.

Confidence that they would go and put things right immediately were somewhat curtailed by the astonishing fact that Lazio had not won a Serie A home game since beating Monza on 9 February. Really.

That says a lot about the nose-dive in form that ultimately led to them crashing out of the Europa League to Bodo/Glimt, tumbling out of the European places on the final day of the Serie A season after losing to Lecce, and coach Marco Baroni heading for the exit.

But it did leave Sarri needing a victory on his second home debut to turn the page on a new era and prove that the opening weekend’s capitulation was not a fair reflection of this team’s level.  

They delivered. Lazio’s thumping 4-0 win not only put an end to talk of how long it has been since their last home victory but went some way to answering doubts about this side.

Sarri’s success in his first spell in Rome, particularly a superb second season when he took Lazio to the dizzy heights of second place, was built on a solid defensive base.

In that 2022-23 campaign, Ivan Provedel kept a league-high 21 clean sheets that was also a joint-record for any goalkeeper in the three-points-for-a-win era in Serie A (since the 1994-95 season) alongside Gianluigi Buffon and Morgan De Sanctis.

Pre-season had suggested the coach intended to go down a similar route this time around, with his side struggling to dazzle in attack but keeping three clean sheets in five friendly matches.

That was quite a feat, given he was working with the same defence that was regularly torn apart under Baroni, conceding 49 goals last season – the same as Genoa and the worst record in the top half of the table bar Como.  

If Sarri was showing progress in organising the defence – up until that opening-day collapse in Como, that is – then the same could not be said for the other end of the pitch.

Questions around where the goals were going to come from were repeated and understandable. For all Taty Castellanos and Boulaye Dia’s qualities, being a reliable 15-goal-a-season striker isn’t one of them. And ahead of kick-off on Sunday, neither had scored in six games under Sarri (including the pre-season friendlies).

The pair produced 19 goals between them in a very attack-minded side last season, but the team were otherwise too often reliant on the barely believable form of 36-year-old top scorer Pedro to get them out of tight spots, with captain Mattia Zaccagni offering just three league goals in the second half of the season.

The midfield did not threaten much either, with the almost ever-present Nicolo Rovella and Matteo Guendouzi scoring one goal between them in Serie A.

Gone are the days of Sarri being able to rely on the talent of a Ciro Immobile, Luis Alberto, Felipe Anderson or Sergej Milinkovic-Savic to ensure that this team only needed a sniff to find the goal. In the season they finished runners-up, Lazio outperformed their xG by nine goals thanks to the clinical efforts of their star players.

The biggest boost to be taken from Sunday’s handsome win, then, was it being by far the most dynamic and dangerous Lazio have looked in attack in the Sarri 2.0 era.

Castellanos needed a big performance and delivered, setting up the first two goals – the second with a delicious rabona through ball for Zaccagni – before opening his account for the season with the simplest of headers after Lorenzo Montipo flapped at a cross.  

The Argentina international deservedly scooped the player of the match award and it will be a weight off the shoulders of Sarri, the fans and the man himself that people can stop talking about a goal drought that had stretched back to April.

Dia then stepped off the bench to score Lazio’s fourth to top off a hugely encouraging evening where the identity of Sarri’s side in the attacking third took shape more than ever.

While the barnstorming runs of Nuno Tavares and tricky dribbling of Zaccagni are long-established threats, the run into the box and calm finish of Guendouzi was something very new.

The Frenchman’s midfield partner Rovella showed his magisterial range of passing, too. His ability to go short or long, quick or slow, safe or bold, was on display as he repeatedly exposed holes in Verona’s new-look defence from deep before getting an assist on the board with his cross for Castellanos’ header.

Reda Belahyane is yet to make his mark in Rome, but showed signs of promise by putting Dia’s goal on a plate for him as two subs combined.

Sarri has been handed a tough assignment: make the old look new.

But as Rome comes back to life, so have Lazio. A purposeful performance brimming with positive answers to difficult questions could not have been timed better.