Pierfrancesco Celada for BI
As I stood in an airless bus shuttling me from my budget airline to the terminal at Venice's airport, the day before Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez's wedding, I looked out the window and saw Kim Kardashian's private jet.
A bead of sweat dripped down my forehead, and I imagined her handlers whisking her to a private exit, where a speedboat would be waiting to take her into the city.
I wanted to ask locals what they thought of a wedding that was either a display of extreme or aspirational wealth — depending on who you asked — in a city where overtourism, high living costs, and homes becoming holiday rentals had seen the population drop by 120,000 to about 50,000 since the 1950s.
I found two competing visions of the city. One was pristine and curated: a backdrop for black-tie photo ops whose guests arrived by private jet. The other was chaotic, crumbling, overwhelming, and imperfect, but lived in.
From the moment I arrived in Venice, the difference between what the ultra-rich, the average tourist, and the locals experienced was impossible to miss.
Pierfrancesco Celada for BI
I used the 50-minute wait in the sun for a crowded vaporetto — Venice's public water bus — into the city to people-watch.
I looked from a distance behind a chain-linked fence as a steady stream of VIPs — most notably Oprah Winfrey and Gayle King — stepped from a private dock onto private water taxis. Paparazzi lenses clicked beside me.
The boats, some carrying only luggage, were headed to five-star hotels accessible only by water, the canals acting like moats.
Feeling flustered, both by what I'd just seen and by the 84-degree Fahrenheit heat, I asked the receptionist at my three-star, slightly dated but perfectly adequate hotel what she thought of the wedding.
She wasn't bothered. Venice has bigger problems, she told me: pickpocketing, boats damaging historic foundations, and overtourism.
Many Venetians I spoke to echoed that sentiment. The wedding felt distant—a media circus that barely touched their lives.
"It doesn't affect us," Francesca Babolini, a Venetian photographer, told me while working on her laptop in a café near one of the main squares.
Pierfrancesco Celada for BI
Mario Peliti, an editor and gallerist, whom I found sipping a drink outside a restaurant near a five-star hotel, agreed.
"He's not the first or the last rich man to come to Venice," he told me, adding that the city is "absolutely" used to hosting the wealthy in its palazzos, churches, and canals. Once a major trading center between Europe and Asia, it has, of course, long been a destination for the rich and powerful.
At the Rialto market — the city's main market, which has been open for seven centuries — traders greeted regulars and haggled over the price of spices, fresh fish, vegetables, and fruit, including gigantic beefsteak tomatoes.
The museums were open as usual, and tourists lined up outside, squinting at their maps in the sun. The vaporetto ran on time, although boarding was a battle, with people elbowing for space on already packed decks.
At Piazza San Marco, however, there was a break from the routine.
Pierfrancesco Celada for BI
Many protests had taken place in advance of the Bezos-Sanchez wedding, largely coordinated by a pop-up group called "No Space for Bezos," and one was underway at Piazza San Marco. A person had climbed one of the three flagpoles in Venice's central square.
In a similar spot on Monday, Greenpeace rolled out a huge banner with Bezos' face, reading: "If you can rent Venice for your wedding, you can pay more tax." The following day, protesters climbed a crane to put up a sign that said: "Tax the rich to give back to the planet."
Activists had planned to block the city's canals and fill them with inflatable alligators to delay wedding guests headed for the Scuola Grande della Misericordia, a venue in the heart of the city. But the couple moved the final-day wedding celebration to near the Arsenale, an area further out from the center.
When the protester finally descended the pole, police carried him away. The crowd erupted in support of the activist, while others shouted: "Shame!"
It was a brief reminder that not everyone was indifferent to Bezos and Sanchez's choice of Venice as their destination wedding.
Pierfrancesco Celada for BI
Tommaso Cacciari, an activist and fourth-generation Venetian, was among those who helped organize protests against what they saw as a boastful spectacle in their hometown.
"Jeff Bezos, in his amazing arrogance, thought that he would come, not to a city, but to a theme park," he said. "He wanted to use Venice as a background, we used him to speak about the real problems of Venice."
For Cacciari, the wedding isn't just another celebrity event; it's a symbol of how, in his view, the city caters to the superrich rather than the people who work, grind, and, increasingly, struggle to live here.
"Bezos found out that Venice is not yet only a theme park," he went on. "It's still lived in by citizens, by activists, by people who love their city and want to change the way it's being run."
The respective representatives of Bezos and Sanchez and the mayor of Venice didn't immediately respond to requests for comment from BI.
A protest march was planned for Saturday night, but so far, the activists and the wedding party had yet to meaningfully collide. Judging by how closed off the celebrations were, it seemed unlikely the protesters would get close.
Pierfrancesco Celada for BI
The luxury hotels were impenetrable. I tried to get into five of them and was turned away every time.
From the early hours each morning, paparazzi camped a canal-length away from the Aman hotel, which was Bezos and Sanchez's wedding basecamp, to get their shots, which were often obscured by a gazebo placed outside the entrance to shield guests from public view.
Swarms of police officers blocked access to the Chiesa della Madonna dell'Orto church, where Bezos and Sanchez were hosting a welcome party.
By Friday, the closest the press and curious tourists could get to the celebrities, who would be attending a party at San Giorgio Maggiore, was a workers' entrance. From there, we saw little more than a fence and a row of security guards.
MARCO BERTORELLO/AFP via Getty Images
But few locals were even looking.
As Bezos and Sánchez's wedding played out behind barricades and blackout gazebos, the rest of Venice carried on.
They opened their shops and shouted into phones between puffs of cigarettes. Meanwhile, tourists leaned against stone walls, licking melting gelato.
On the same island where the Bezos-Sánchez wedding was taking place, another couple did a wedding photo shoot. There were no bodyguards, fences, or entourage — just a bride avoiding spending too long in the sun to keep her makeup from melting.
Pierfrancesco Celada for BI
Aside from the occasional short-lived protest, anti-Bezos posters scattered around the city, and the occasional security cordon, you might not have known anything was happening at all.
Two Venices existed in parallel that weekend — one arriving by private jet, slipping onto speedboats; the other waiting in line for the vaporetto, fanning itself in the heat.
Cacciari, the protester, said he loves this version of the city, with all its chaos and friction.
"A city is a place where people meet, where people even fight," he said. "It's the melting of cultures — even the conflict between cultures."
