VENICE, Italy >> On Friday, Venice’s canals filled with polished motorboats bearing Hollywood stars, millionaires and Khloé Kardashian in a cape of pink feathers as they headed to Jeff Bezos’ wedding to Lauren Sánchez.
Today, it was the turn of dozens of public order police officers on foot and watercraft.
A day after Sánchez took to Instagram on Friday night to introduce herself to the world as Lauren Sánchez-Bezos, wearing a lacy white mermaid dress, Venice braced for protesters who threatened to descend again on the city to voice their anger over the wedding — and armed conflicts around the world.
Despite his efforts to have a private, if star-studded, multimillion-dollar wedding in Venice, Bezos’ wealth and powerful connections left the couple’s thoroughly curated celebrations caught up in an intensely political and moral debate.
From Venetian bars to British newspapers and even among Italian politicians in Rome, the wedding became a topic of conversation, focusing not on the bride’s outfits, but on Bezos’ businesses, money and friends.
The result was an over-the-top party in one of the world’s most stunning cities mixing Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Ivanka Trump and political overtones.
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Or, as fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg put it in a phone interview, a celebration that “everyone is making such a big thing out of.”
Yet there was no mistaking the couple’s desire to combine all the ingredients of a swanky VIP party.
After ditching Bezos’ usual straightforward clothes and apparent shyness, the couple surrounded themselves with showbiz stars. Their Venetian wedding was the culmination of their path to A-list status, as testified by the presence of movie stars like Leonardo DiCaprio in a baseball cap pulled so low on his face that he probably could not see.
The festivities started Thursday with a welcome party in the cloister of the Madonna dell’Orto church. Models Vittoria Ceretti and Kendall Jenner; actress Sydney Sweeney; and Ivanka Trump, all in flowery dresses, and Kim Kardashian in a skintight snakeskin one, climbed out of water taxis to get to the event as paparazzi photographers shouted their names.
On Friday, Bezos, who, Sánchez told Vogue, “looks good in everything he wears,” put on a tuxedo and arrived at the verdant island of San Giorgio Maggiore with his jet-setter guests, including model Karlie Kloss and tech entrepreneurs Sam Altman and Bill Gates. In an open-air amphitheater, they ate delicacies from a Neapolitan Michelin-starred restaurant as Italian singer Matteo Bocelli delivered an emotional performance.
Tonight, the wedding reception was expected to be held at an ancient Venetian shipyard. That’s when protesters, who had opposed Bezos’ festivities throughout the week, were also planning their grand finale — a “No Bezos no war” march.
The juxtaposition reflected how Bezos’ wedding has become the embodiment of a much broader set of grievances.
Some opposed what they considered the sellout of Venice by local officials that critics said had reduced the city of Marco Polo to a mere background for the photos of tourists and the rich. Others took issue with Bezos’ extraordinary wealth and his recent apparent closeness to President Donald Trump as the president’s actions on various matters were seeding panic in Europe.
On Thursday, as guests landed at Venice Marco Polo Airport, an activist climbed up a pole in front of St. Mark’s Basilica and unrolled a banner that read, “the 1% ruins the world.” That night, Bezos and Sánchez were photographed exchanging a kiss on a water taxi.
“I really don’t like what is going on here,” said Alice Francescatti, 23, smoking a cigarette by two police officers who surveilled the canal near her kayak school, and Bezos’ party. “We cannot keep selling out our world just because someone can pay for it.”
During Thursday night’s party, a thunderstorm broke, sending Sánchez and the guests rushing for motorboats, cramming together under umbrellas. Critics inferred that supernatural forces were opposing the wedding.
On Friday, as singer Usher posed for his wife’s photos and Gates visited a Venetian museum, the city’s narrow alleys and stone squares were plastered with posters showing Bezos’ face and the message, “In the time it takes to read this, Jeff Bezos’ wealth has increased more than your monthly salary.”
Italy’s tourism minister put out a statement defending the wedding and calling for an end to the polemics. She and Venetian officials and business owners were exasperated with the protests and enthusiastic about the money and prestige the event brought to the city.
Because of the threat of protests, Venetian police said even before the events began that the level of security was being increased and that specialized units would be deployed for the protests today, according to Darco Pellos, the prefect of Venice’s police.
It remained unclear whether the couple had already gotten legally married in the United States by the time of Sánchez’s Friday Instagram post. Venice city officials said the couple had not requested to be officially married by city authorities, unlike George Clooney, who tied the knot with Amal Alamuddin in the city in 2014 in a largely uncontroversial affair.
Throughout, Bezos tried to play nice.
He made donations to conservation groups and research centers. As temperatures soared to nearly 90 degrees, some sunburned reporters said the couple’s staff members had handed them ice creams and water as they bobbed in boats in the heat outside his hotel.
The impact on the city was also not as disruptive as many had predicted, but in an explosive political environment, and in a city emptying of its residents and overrun by tourists, every public display of the wedding was taken as a provocation.
The criticism did not appear to ruin the mood inside the parties. Actor Orlando Bloom looked generally chatty. Oprah Winfrey seemed amused, even in the rain, and Ivanka Trump posted videos of Murano glassmakers blowing vases on Friday.
It was unclear whether news of protests even reached all of the guests, and whether the topic was mentioned in what the Kardashians described on Instagram as their “getting ready conversations” — featuring Khloé Kardashian eating a bag of Ruffles potato chips in her room in the Gritti Palace hotel.
Bezos also seemed over the moon.
“It’s an impossible city,” Bezos told reporters as he glided by on a motorboat on the way to one of the parties. “It can’t exist, and yet here it is.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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