It was billed as the “wedding of the century”, said Camilla Tominey in The Daily Telegraph, but in the event, the Bezos-Sánchez nuptials in Venice last week did not exactly ooze “sophistication”. The three-day, multimillion-pound shindig was a “triumph of tackiness over taste” – from the foam party on Bezos’s $500 million yacht to the flood of Kardashians, Trumps and the like arriving in a fleet of private jets, to the bride’s 27 outfits and the millions of dollars spent on flowers.
Many Venetians, it’s fair to say, weren’t impressed, said Victoria Derbyshire in The i Paper. The Amazon founder was met with angry protests by locals, who felt that he was treating “their beloved city” as a “private amusement park for the very wealthy”. Activists of many stripes joined in: in St Mark’s Square, Greenpeace unveiled a huge banner reading: “If you can rent Venice for your wedding you can pay more tax.”
You can see why Venetians were furious, said Rachel Spence in the Financial Times. The wedding treated the city as a mere “backdrop”, just as tourism has reduced it “to a hollow, Disneyfied shell” with few non-tourism jobs and sky-high house prices. True, said Angelina Villa-Clarke in The Independent, but Bezos is hardly to blame for decades of overtourism, and what’s an extra 200 wedding guests “in a city that welcomes around 30 million tourists each year”? The couple’s rich pals are probably preferable to the throngs of visitors who come to Venice on day trips, clogging up the streets as they take in the sights while barely contributing to the local economy. Bezos, by contrast, donated €3 million to Venetian causes, and many local traders were delighted by the vast amount of cash the billionaire splashed across the city.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
Sign up for The Week’s Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
As for turning Venice into a billionaires’ playground, said Stephen Bleach in The Times, do Bezos’s critics know the first thing about Venetian history? The Doges built its palazzos “for the express purpose of displaying their prodigious wealth”; rich merchants flocked there to outdo each other in vulgar shows of decadence. “The world’s most beautiful city is a monument to more than 1,000 years of bling.” Bezos, the fourth-richest man on the planet, was simply continuing that grand tradition.
