Rome's newest art museum falls victim to covid-19 regulations.

Musja, a privately-owned museum dedicated to contemporary art, is closing down exactly a year after it opened its doors on a side street near Campo de' Fiori in central Rome.

The news, reported by Artribune, was broken by Ovidio Maria Jacorossi, the son of the museum's founder of the same name who died aged 85 last October.

"It is with great regret", he writes, "that we find ourselves forced to communicate the closure of Musja, a museum born just under a year ago with the aim of sharing, with the whole community, the vast collection of the late founder Ovidio Jacorossi and to contribute to the artistic and cultural panorama of Rome and Italy with a programme of international scope, sensitive to the most innovative trends in contemporary art."

• Musja: new art museum in central Rome

The viability of the museum had become compromised by the covid-19 emergency and the subsequent restrictions that would not have "allowed the museum to reopen its doors," said Jacorossi who pointed to the incompatibility of the building's spaces with social distancing.

The Musja collection, begun by Jacorossi in the 1980s, will be exhibited in rotation. It comprises paintings, drawings and sculpture by Italy's greatest 20th-century artists, from Balla to de Chirico, Severini to Sironi, including the principal Italian art movements of the last century.

Artribune highlights the positive results attained by the museum on Via de' Chiavari which saw the restoration of a set of interconnected spaces that grew out of the ancient ruins of Pompey's Theatre, including a glass corridor passing through a courtyard attributed to the 16th-century architect Baldassarre Peruzzi.

• Ovidio Jacorossi dies in Rome

The museum, the fulfillment of a lifelong dream for Ovidio Jacorossi, also had success with its first and only exhibition - The Dark Side - Who is afraid of the dark? - which welcomed 10,000 visitors.

Jacorossi Junior says that the "excessively bureaucratic procedures, the few incentives to restart and the great uncertainty about what will happen" do not permit the museum to move forward.

Describing the museum's closure as a "light going out," Jacorossi says his wish is that "this darkness will soon disappear and that art can return as soon as possible to play its role as light and guide."