Venice thronging as celebs jet in for Bezos wedding
More than 90 private jets carrying about 200 celebrity guests for the wedding of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez are expected to arrive at Venice’s Marco Polo airport in coming days, according to reports.
Among those arriving in their own jets are TV personalities Oprah Winfrey, Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian and billionaires Eric Schmidt of Google and Bill Gates of Microsoft.
“Marco Polo airport will practically become the global capital of the star system for almost a week,” Corriere della Sera newspaper reported on Monday (local time).
Citing aviation sources, it said there had already been 95 landings.
The first guests are expected on Tuesday. The city is already thronged with tourists crowding its narrow streets.
It is not yet known when Bezos, 61, and Sánchez, 55, will arrive. The wedding celebration is expected to be held on Friday.
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Italian media report that Bezos’ private yacht, the Koru, is off the Croatian coast.
Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez at the Monaco GP. Photo: AAP
The couple is reported to have booked a suite at the Aman Venice. It is the same hotel on the Grand Canal, where actor George Clooney and his humanitarian lawyer wife Amal stayed when they wed in the city in 2014.
But not everyone is happy.
The weeks leading up to the extravagant event have been marked by protests and disagreements in the Italian tourist city.
“We will block the canals, line the streets with our bodies, block the canals with inflatables, dinghies, boats,” protest group No Space for Bezos Federica Toninello told a crowd of hundreds at a protest at the city’s famous Rialto Bridge earlier in June.
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“We want to spark a citywide conversation and to say that people like Bezos – who represent a future we don’t want and a world we don’t want to live in – are not welcome here.”
The No Space for Bezos campaign unites activists from various Venetian groups – from those who want more housing for the city’s dwindling population to the anti-cruise ship committee.
Media and security boats surround Clooney and his wife Amal, as they leave the Aman hotel.
The group has plastered banners across Venice, complaining that the mediaeval and Renaissance city needs public services and housing, not celebrities and over-tourism.
“These topics are all linked,” Toninelli told the BBC.
“They all have to do with Venice turning into a place that puts tourists, rather than residents, at the centre of its politics.”
Venice has fewer than 50,000 permanent residents. Its annual visitor numbers – estimated at 15 million in 2023 – dwarf the local population.
Mayor Luigi Brugnaro and regional governor Luca Zaia, however, argue that the lavish wedding will bring an economic windfall to local businesses, including the motor boats and gondolas that operate its myriad canals.
Bezos, 61, the founder of e-commerce giant Amazon and the world’s third-richest man, got engaged to journalist Sanchez, 55, in 2023, four years after the collapse of his 25-year marriage to Mackenzie Scott.
Bezos and Scott have four children, while Sanchez was previously married to Hollywood agent Patrick Whitesell, with whom she has two children. She also has a son with NFL tight end Tony Gonzalez.
