BEZOS VS VENICE

Residents are planning protests over the tech billionaire taking the city hostage’ with his 10m wedding, which will be staged during its peak tourist season

- Zoé Beaty

It begins, as all good fairytales do, with a $10m budget, a megayacht the size of a football pitch and a network of A-listers so starry it could alter the tides: in a few weeks, Jeff Bezos’s wedding to Lauren Sanchez is set to be a spectacle of opulence. After a five-year romance, the pair have planned an extravagant celebration in the heart of Venice, a city renowned for its timeless beauty, labyrinthine canals and centuries-old architecture. But the Adriatic city isn’t swooning – far from it. In fact, the locals are absolutely seething.

One of the richest men on the planet is holding their home “hostage”, they say – to the Venetians, this isn’t so much of a destination wedding but an occupation. Residents and activists say that the nuptials – and the pure extravagance planned for the celebration – are set to turn their home into a “playground for the wealthy”.

The “luxury footprint” – the environmental cost of the weekend in private jets and yachts contributing to Venice’s already high carbon emissions – they say, will be huge; the celebrity entourage and logistical chaos they’ll bring with them a perfect example of how the spirit of the city has been eroded by unchecked tourism and commercialisation, this time with the added audacity of exclusivity. The response of the locals? Widespread protests reportedly being planned to take the city by storm and attempt to mar the so-called wedding of the year.

It’s not all that hard to see where they’re coming from. The basics are this: reports suggest that on 24 June, billionaire Bezos and his once news anchor, now socialite fiancée, will wed on his $500m (£370m), 3,493 tonne yacht, Koru (also the tallest sailing yacht in the world).

However, reports say that views from the boat, which will be anchored in Venice lagoon, will be severely restricted – it can’t be moored too far into the famous Grand Canal, because it is (you guessed it) simply too big.