Jacorossi dies just weeks after opening private art museum in Rome.

The Roman entrepreneur and art collector Ovidio Jacorossi has died in Rome aged 85, just weeks after opening Musja, the privately-run museum dedicated to contemporary art in the city centre.

The museum, the fulfillment of a lifelong dream for Jacorossi, launched on 9 October with an exhibition titled Chi ha paura del buio?, the first in a trilogy of shows under the theme The Dark Side.

The Jacorossi family's entrepreneurial adventure began on the site of the museum on Via dei Chiavari where Ovidio's grandfather Agostino opened a small coal shop in 1922.

In the subsequent decades the hugely successful Jacorossi group became a major player in the fuel and energy sectors, as well as diversifying into logistics, heating and the management of public buildings.

Ovidio Jacorossi concentrated in particular on the relationship between business and culture, and in the 1970s he began to build his vast collection of Italian art, comprising paintings, drawings and sculpture by Italy's greatest 20th-century artists, from Balla to de Chirico, Severini to Sironi.

Musja paid tribute to its founder as a "visionary man" who dedicated his life to the "diffusion of art as a fundamental tool for the growth of the individual and the community."

Photo R. De Antonis / Artribune