Jeff Bezos’s wedding hits troubled waters

Bezos has had to shift his nuptials from the city centre to the old industrial district and hire former US marines to provide a security cordon in the face of mounting protests. His planned Saturday night party at the former church Scuola Grande di Santa Maria della Misericordia will now be in the Arsenale shipyard. He’s abandoned plans to moor his enormous superyacht near St Mark’s Square, instead leaving it off the coast of Croatia and arriving in Venice by helicopter.

Earlier this month, there seemed little reason for him to worry about the city’s reaction. “Most people were indifferent,” according to Gianpaolo Scarante, 74, a former Italian ambassador and resident of Venice. “The protests were very small.”

But on 12 June, the No Space For Bezos protest group unfurled a large banner from the bell tower of one of the wedding venues, the basilica on San Giorgio Maggiore island, featuring the billionaire’s name crossed out in red. At the same time the deeply unpopular city mayor, Luigi Brugnaro, was trying to hold a press conference. Pictures of the stunt were shared around the world, gathering support across Italy and beyond.

The success of No Space For Bezos has opened up space for a pile-on. So far this week, the UK protest group Everyone Hates Elon, Greenpeace and activists from Extinction Rebellion have all held protests in the city, with more expected. After the US bombing of Iran, anti-war groups contacted Federica Toninello, one of the organisers of the No Space For Bezos campaign, and will join the locals’ protest march on Saturday.

“We didn’t expect our protests to achieve such a huge first victory,” Toninello, 33, a veteran of the city’s anti-cruise ship protests in 2021, told The Observer. “There were maybe 30 or 40 of us, and we planned to block the canals and the road around the Misericordia in carnival style. But the [first] protest was covered all around the world, and we had other movements calling us and suddenly this was a global event.”

The march on Saturday will now be anti-war as well as anti-wedding, she said. “Bezos is so tied up with the Trump administration and [Trump’s] daughter [Ivanka] is attending the wedding, so people from outside Venice are all coming to join us.” Toninello seemed slightly nonplussed. “With the campaign against the big ships, we had to fight for years and years and years. This time round, we do a small protest and everything stopped.”

The move to the Arsenale shipyard will help ensure the wedding suffers minimal protest disruption. “The Arsenale is very easy to secure, easier than any other place in Venice, because in the past it was completely closed off to keep the secrets of Venice’s shipbuilding,” explains Scarante. “The people working there couldn’t even go out. They were living inside with their families. There is a perimeter wall, strong doors, it’s very easy to protect. When closed off, the only way in is by boat, so security is more efficient.”

The Misericordia move could dampen local anger at the deal struck between Bezos and mayor Brugnaro, a centre-right independent businessman who has been in charge since 2015 and is known locally as the “Berlusconi of the lagoon”. Brugnaro owns the Misericordia, which is held in a blind trust until he completes his second term next year. He is under investigation for corruption.

“The buyout of the hotels was known in January,” one local luxury organiser explains, referring to the fact that Bezos has booked up several high-end hotels in the city. “Usually with a big event, like Dolce & Gabbana doing their fashion shows in San Maro, they offer a large amount of money. The Rialto bridge was restored by the owner of Diesel [the fashion brand]. Until this week, I didn’t hear that Jeff Bezos had offered any charitable donation. Sunday, we hear he has offered one million dollars for Corila, a foundation that studies Venice’s lagoon. It seems quite late to make the offer.”

The wedding is expected to cost £34-£41m, according to Luca Zaia, the governor of the Veneto region, with about 200 guests – ranging from Kim Kardashian and Bill Gates to Mick Jagger, Lachlan Murdoch, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, plus reportedly Orlando Bloom without Katy Perry amid rumours the couple have split. The private jet terminal at Venice’s Marco Polo airport is not large enough to host the 95 private jets arriving for the event, so some have had to land at Treviso or Verona.

The luxury organiser says guests are already complaining about the tight schedule. “There are three days and people have no free time, everything is booked. These people like to stay in their rooms and order room service, sleep, call the hair stylist to the room, get ready. Now there’s no time to change into all the different outfits they’ll have brought for all the different events.”

Bezos, conversely, seems to be having the time of his life, hosting a foam party on his yacht before heading for the wedding suite at the Aman Hotel on the Grand Canal – the same suite that George Clooney and Amal Alamuddin booked for their Venice wedding. “Nobody protested when George Clooney was here,” Toninello points out. “Venice isn’t hostile to everyone.”

Photographs: Luca Bruno/AP, Stefano Mazzola/Getty Images