According to the sparkly named Lustre Magazine, Venice’s 750-year-old Scuola vecchia della Misericordia, pictured above, is ‘a stage where Renaissance masonry backdrops neon ideas’, which sounds right up yacht enthusiast and part-time astronaut Jeff Bezos’s street. 

Rumoured to be booked for his marriage this month to journalist, Lauren Sanchez, (many of the city’s water taxis are too), it’s all a big little secret for now. Although nobody really knows anything for sure, and perhaps Bezos doesn’t either, ‘wedding experts’ quoted in the Daily Mail, probably equally clueless, think it could cost anything up to $20 million, which is roughly 0.0088% of his $227 billion wealth. To put things in perspective, that’s like someone with £25,000 spending £2.20 on their big day so, relatively speaking, one could reasonably call him a tight bastard. 

For other reasons, quite a few Venetians aren’t keen on the cheapskate either. Last Friday, one of them, Federica Toninello, said that Bezos won’t get near the Misericordia, saying “We will line the streets with our bodies, block the canals with lifesavers, dinghies and our boats”, which drew loud applause from the roughly 300 representatives of the various citizens’ groups who aren’t happy either.

They don’t like the idea that their city, already a tourist mecca, has housing costs so high that ordinary Venetians can’t afford to live there anymore. And they don’t like the fact that the Bezos Sanchez nuptuals coincide with peak season, when tens of thousands of visitors will be pouring into the city daily anyway.

With this already disrupting the life of the dwindling resident population they’d prefer not to be joined by Lauren and Jeff’s celebrity mates, with the Daily Mail citing rumours (i.e. they made it up) that, among many others, the happy couple’s high value well wishers will include Orlando Bloom, Katy Perry, Kris Jenner, Kim Kardashian, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, the last 2 alone reason enough to steer clear of the city. They should at least be pleased that the orange one is too busy in his global peacekeeping role.

It’s a steroid and dollar infused example of a phenomena affecting many holiday destinations, with anti-tourism sentiment erupting all over Europe as locals complain that holidaymakers are driving them out and changing the very character of the places they come to see. 

On Sunday, large-scale demonstrations were held in several popular holiday spots, including Barcelona, Valencia, Mallorca, San Sebastián, Granada, Genoa, Naples, Palermo and Venice. Activists under the umbrella alliance ‘Sur de Europa contra la Turistización’ (Catalan for Southern Europe Against Touristification). They were calling for a dramatic rethink of tourism’s role in their communities.

Here in Greece it’s more muted with overrun Mykonos and Santorini most affected, although it looks like the Gods may have intervened in the case of the latter, now facing a significant decline in tourist numbers due to a series of earthquakes earlier this year, with some seeing the period as an opportunity to recalibrate.

As the University of the Aegean’s Professor Kostas Theodorou said recently, nothing is authentic anymore and, everything now interfered with, he warns of the “Disneyfication” of island life. With the soon to arrive private jets, superyachts and helicopters spilling out A listers in Venice, the same could be said of life there, although rather than Disneyfication, it’s set to be Amazon Primed. 

A couple of notes to end on, demonstrating the ghastly obscenity of the cheapskate’s willy waving, is how he fared during Covid, and his 125 metre long plaything, the tax haven registered yacht, Koru, currently at anchor in the Adriatic.

Covid-19

‘His wealth climbed so much between March-September 2020 that he could have given all 876,000 Amazon employees a $105,000 bonus and still have been as wealthy as he was before the pandemic.’

‘The Inequality Virus’ Oxfam International. 25.01. 2021

---

Koru

Quoted as liking to spend time on areas where he can add value, many Venetians will be hoping that the gilded groom might reconsider his planned invasion and stick to his word, calling off his A list troops, pulling up anchor and sailing far away. He’s got a big rocket, so why not outer space? Probably best to bypass Mars. They’re already a bit uppity there at fellow phallus fan Musk’s colonisation plans, but Venus, named after the Roman goddess of love, would surely be wedding perfect.

---