In 2019, Nomad founder Meredith Tabbone bought a house she had never seen, in a town she had never visited, for one euro.
A financial advisor in Chicago, she heard about an unusual auction: a Sicilian town selling off its abandoned houses for one euro. The town was Sambuca di Sicilia. As she looked into it, she discovered something she could not have guessed: this was the very place her great-grandfather had left for America more than a century earlier. She bid, won, and the renovation that followed became the part the cameras loved, told by CNBC, the Independent, The New York Times, and the Chicago Sun-Times.
But that house, her home, was only the beginning. Once the walls were finished, the village kept pulling her in. Sambuca was filling with newcomers from all over the world, and living right there on the island were contemporary artists whose work was extraordinary.
In 2021 Meredith bought a second building at number 8 Cortile Abene, this one not for living but for its view and potential, a spot that bridges the wide Sicilian landscape opening in front of it and the life of the borgo rising behind.
Within about eighteen months it had a name and a home: Nomad Art Collective.
The building is now fully transformed, a gallery below and an artist residency above.
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