sport news Inside Ayrton Senna's last hotel room - and to where the champion fell: 30 ... trends now

There is nothing to suggest, from the outside, that there is anything different about Room 200 at Hotel Castello on the outskirts of the pretty little spa town of Castel San Pietro Terme, a few miles from Bologna.

The bedroom door is as plain and unremarkable as every other door in the modest hotel. Its windows do not have a view to speak of, because there is nothing much to see out here on the edge of town.

But inside, the suite of three rooms has been preserved — with the addition of a flat screen television — the way it was when Ayrton Senna, the man who many still believe to be the greatest racing driver ever, walked out of that door on the morning of May 1, 1994, and never returned.

The plain white decor is the same, the wardrobe with its light brown lacquered finish and its five shallow drawers is the same, the Japanese frieze above the bed, with four panels featuring scenes of the moon and mountains and a spindly tree clinging to the slopes, is the same, too.

The massage couch in the adjoining room is still there. Even the bath, a kind of mini-jacuzzi, has been kept the way it was when Senna left that morning to make the short journey to the Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari in Imola, where he would start on the 65th pole position of his illustrious career for the San Marino Grand Prix.

There is one other difference, too, apart from the flat screen TV. Some words, spoken by Senna, are written on the wall in ornate script in the suite's entrance hall. They are the first thing you see when you walk through the door.

'If a person no longer has dreams,' they say, 'they no longer have a reason to live. Dreaming is necessary, even if reality must be glimpsed in the dream. For me it is one of the principles of life.'

It was a public holiday in Italy on Thursday. To celebrate the Festa della Liberazione, a band marched through the streets of Castel San Pietro Terme, and nine miles away to the south-east in Imola, they threw the gates of the circuit open to the public.

I squeezed my hire car into a space beneath the giant mural that depicts Senna pointing to the heavens and dominates the entrance to the circuit at the Piazza Ayrton Senna da Silva. 

Families sat in the cafe, sipping their coffees, and then headed out for a stroll around a track that is far too beautiful to have witnessed so much death and grief.

I stood on the starting grid for a couple of minutes and then set off towards Tamburello. 

An older brother and his sister raced each other on little scooters towards a corner whose name sends a shiver down the spines of Formula One fans everywhere as the track curved gently away to the left in the distance. Another, older kid rumbled past on roller blades.

I had walked this walk before but that was 30 years ago, the day after the race, the day after the most cursed weekend in F1 history, when death and mourning were all around and I was a young reporter trying to come to terms with a tragedy that I also knew would probably be the biggest story I would ever cover.

On the Friday before Senna was killed, his young compatriot Rubens Barrichello had been involved in a huge accident during the first qualifying session. 

When Barrichello regained consciousness in the circuit's medical centre, the first face he saw was Senna's, tears rolling down his cheeks.

The next day, Roland Ratzenberger, the Austrian Simtek driver, was killed at the Villeneuve section of the track, an innocuous left-right kink a few hundred yards further on in the lap from Tamburello.

Senna, who was 34, insisted on being taken to the scene, against the sport's rules. 

Ratzenberger was the first racing driver to lose his life at a grand prix weekend since the 1982 season, when Riccardo Paletti was killed at the Canadian Grand Prix.

Early that evening, according to the esteemed journalist Richard Williams' brilliant book 'The Death of Ayrton Senna', Senna phoned his girlfriend Adriane Galisteu from the Hotel Castello and told her he would not be racing in the grand prix.

Later that night, after a dinner with friends at Trattoria Romagnola in the town, where pictures of him dominate one of the rooms, he called her again and said he had changed his mind.

It is hard now, at a time when Senna's records have been eclipsed first by Michael Schumacher and then by Lewis Hamilton, to grasp quite how significant a figure he was in the world of sport.

It was not just that he was a supremely talented driver who had won three world titles and was expected to win many more, at a time when the grid had been packed with greats such as Alain Prost, Nelson Piquet and Nigel Mansell.

There was something else about Senna, too. There was a melancholy that seems, with hindsight, like the sadness of a tragedy foretold. But there was something wild, as well, something that could not be tamed, something that scared other drivers.

When Senna rammed Prost at the first corner of the 1990 Japanese Grand Prix at Suzuka, taking revenge for an incident the previous season and also ensuring he won the driver's title, his rival was disgusted.

'I am not prepared to fight against irresponsible people who are not afraid to die,' Prost said.

That kind of madness, determination, obsession and commitment is an aphrodisiac for sports fans and at the start of the 1990s, Senna was one of the biggest sports stars in the world, alongside men like Michael Jordan and Wayne Gretzky.