For Antonio Conti, time stopped on the evening of May 29, 1985.

He had taken his Juventus-supporting daughter Giusy to watch the Italian club play English team Liverpool in the 1985 European Cup final in Brussels at the Heysel Stadium.

It should have been a time for celebration. Father and daughter watching the most prestigious club game in European football in the traditional climax to the season.

Instead, Conti's memories of Heysel are of mayhem and death.

"It was 19:25 CET when everything happened," Conti told CNN. "When I woke up half an hour later I was among dead people, and at that moment I remembered where I was.

"I looked for my daughter until I saw a shoe under a blanket and I understood that she was dead."

For the modern European football fan used to watching matches in bright, shiny all-seater stadiums, it is almost impossible to imagine attending a football game and dying there.

But in the space of four years in the 1980s, nearly 200 people lost their lives in three horrific European stadium tragedies. First, on May 11 1985, just over two weeks before the Heysel stampede, came a devastating fire at the Bradford City Stadium fire on May 11, and then there was a deadly crush at another English ground -- Hillsborough -- in 1989.

It is only in the last few months that Britain's political and civil institutions have begun to be held to account for the reasons behind the death of 96 people during an FA Cup match at Hillsborough, which has long cast a shadow over the city of Liverpool.

Four years earlier at Heysel, Liverpool had been involved in another stadium tragedy as 39 fans -- 32 from Italy, four from Belgium, two from France, one from Northern Ireland, the youngest just 11 years old -- were killed in a stampede before the European Cup final against Juventus.

"For me that cup will always be covered in death," wrote Juve defender Antonio Cabrini in his autobiography "Io Antonio." "The cup of death".

Forgotten story

Heysel is a story of "incompetence, violence, cover-up, shame and lies," writes Professor John Foot -- the author of the authoritative history of Italian football, "Calcio."

"It's also a story of forgetting," adds Foot. "Many people have an interest in not remembering what happened that night: the players, many fans, the Belgian politicians and police forces."

Foot's analysis is shared by Rosalina Vannini Gonnelli, who lost her husband in the tragedy and whose 18-year-old daughter was injured that night 27 years ago.

"Is there anyone who gives a damn?" questioned Gonnelli. "News has to be on the front page, then everyone forgets. My daughter will carry that with her for her whole life.

"I'm happy that sometimes there is someone who remembers the tragedy.

"Many, many years have passed. People had forgotten soon after it happened, so now there's no way. The 39 angels will always be in the memories of their loved ones."

Journalist Francesco Caremani was an Italian who cared, and in 2003 he wrote a book about the tragedy -- "The Truths of Heysel -- Chronicle of a Tragedy Foretold."

Caremani was a friend of Otello Lorentini, who was head of the now disbanded Association for the Victims of Heysel.

Lorentini's son Roberto was a doctor who died at Heysel. Roberto had resuscitated a boy before being crushed to death, an act that saw him posthumously awarded a civic medal for his bravery.

"Before my book nobody had listened to the victims. It was the first chance that they had had to speak about the night of the Heysel disaster, of the process and the battle for justice," said Caremani.

When Roberto Lorentini died in 1985, his son Andrea, who is now a sports journalist, was just three.

"I'm angry and bitter because it's impossible to die for a football match," said Andrea. "There isn't logic for what happened in Brussels."

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