Venice cannot be bought, Mr. Bezos

Everyone loves a wedding, don’t they? A chance to dress up, toast the newlyweds, and celebrate into the wee hours of the morning. But when the groom is Jeff Bezos, one of the richest men in the world, and the venue is Venice, not everyone is in a celebratory mood.

The 61-year-old Amazon magnate popped the question to his fiancée, the American journalist, Lauren Sánchez, 55, two years ago. In March, they publicly announced their three-day marriage celebrations would take place this week in Venice. A star-studded array of guests will attend the multi-million-dollar nuptials, including Mick Jagger, Elton John, Oprah Winfrey and Katy Perry, the last of whom recently accompanied Sanchez to the edge of space on an 11-minute ride aboard Bezos’s Blue Origin craft.

The extravagance is also out of this world. A series of high-end hotels – the Gritti Palace, the Hotel Danieli, the Belmond Hotel Cipriani, the St Regis Venice and the Grand Aman Hotel – have been booked out. San Giorgio Maggiore island, opposite St Mark’s Square, where the couple will say “I do”, has been closed to the public and guests will be transported there via a fleet of 30 water taxis.

The wedding planners, Lanza and Baucina, organised the Clooneys’ wedding in Venice in 2014. In other words, the whole ordeal is a hedonist’s wet dream.

The people who actually live here couldn’t be less pleased. Residents of the “pearl of the Adriatic” already have plenty to complain about – their city is drowning, jobs are scarce, rents are rising ever-higher due to holiday lets, overtourism is rife, and the city centre’s resident population has sunk to 48,500.

Last weekend, protestors in the hundreds draped a banner off the Rialto Bridge, which read “No Space for Bezos”. That is also the name of the group leading the opposition to the lavish, multi-day event.

Two weekends ago they hoisted a sign on the San Giorgio Maggiore bell tower, with the name of Bezos crossed out. More recently, Greenpeace activists unfurled a banner in St Mark’s Square reading: “If you can rent Venice for your wedding, you can pay more tax”.

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No Space for Bezos are now planning to stage a protest on June 28 and have been holding workshops and talks to prepare for the big moment. The fury is tangible.

Among the demonstrators is Giacomo Cervo, who lives in the city. “What good could Bezos possibly bring to Venice?” he asked. “All that he and his rich friends are going to do is clog Venice, make it harder for us to get around, create crowds and paint Venice as a fantasy.”

Cervo, along with others, is angry at local government officials for allowing the wedding to take place.

“It’s almost like they have little regard for us, the residents,” he said. “Maybe there will be money from this, but I’d like to see where it goes.

“Will it go towards creating more jobs? Will it go towards making rents more affordable? What will happen and where is the concern for pollution of the waterways when all these yachts appear?”

Young people raised in Venice have moved out in droves to other cities in the Veneto region, such as Padua and Verona. There are more jobs out there and rents are lower. When I asked Cervo about the looming protest, he assured me that he’d be attending as he had with the others.

There was one small victory for the collective. It turns out that Bezos’s $500m, 417ft superyacht Koru and its support vessel the Abeona will now no longer be docking in Venice.

“We had a feeling that Bezos would rock up in his superyacht with other rich people, which is what Venice has been trying to fight for decades as we don’t want polluted waters,” Cervo said. “This proves that Venice cannot be bought, even by Jeff Bezos.”