When activists in Venice, Italy learned that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos would be holding his wedding to former journalist Lauren Sánchez in their city, they knew something had to be done.
The “No Space for Bezos” movement, the slogan they would come to adopt, was launched in the Laboratorio Occupato Morion, a social organizing space near the city’s center. In a Facebook post from that time, organizers urged the public to unite around two causes: the unjustness of a city with needs continually sacrificed to the needs of tourists, and the unjustness of the existence of a figure like Bezos, currently the third richest man in the world, with a net worth of around $241 billion, according to Bloomberg.
“Venice is not on board, and Venice will never be on board,” read the post. “Venice is antifascist. There’s no space for oligarchs, for their private parties and for their dirty money.”
Parts of the city were so blocked by guards, certain canals inaccessible, that permanent residents had trouble getting to their homes, said 29-year-old Martina Vergnano, one of the protesters.
“The issue that is now coming to light, symbolized by Jeff Bezos’ marriage, speaks to us about the real, everyday problems linked to mass tourism and to a city that is completely imagined, conceived and increasingly built to be a backdrop,” she said, “when in reality, it is not—it is a place where people actually live.”
Vergnano came to Venice for college and decided to stay, but other protesters, like 27-year-old Stella Faye, who was born and raised there, have seen firsthand the change in the city over almost three decades. The university researcher studied in the Netherlands and Sweden but made a conscious choice to return to Venice to live, in part because she saw its suffering.
“I wanted to go against the tendency of the people who are pushed away by Venice, [by] an administration that doesn’t take care of it. Especially for young people, it’s very difficult to live in Venice, because it’s very expensive to afford rent, to find a home, to find a well-paid job that allows you to live in Venice,” Faye said. “I chose to go back precisely for this reason, to fight for a different city, a city that welcomes people and doesn’t make them leave.”
At first, the meetings were convened by the usual attendees: a mix of local grassroots committees, from a housing assembly to the group against big ships in Venice. But organizer Federica Toninello, 33, also began to notice people whom they had never seen before, whom, she said, “were very angry, not only about the impact of Bezos’ wedding on the city, but also about Bezos himself.”
The time-frame was tight—activists had roughly a month to organize from the outset of their efforts. But little by little, they made their plans visible. In mid-June, they hung a poster inscribed with Bezos’ name, crossed out by a red X, on the bell tower of the city’s famous San Giorgio Maggiore, timed to coincide with a press conference held by the city’s mayor, Luigi Brugnaro. The timing paid off, as the mayor dedicated a segment of his press conference to maligning the group, per reporting from Venezia Today. (Teen Vogue reached out to the city of Venice’s press office for comment.)
“In what other city is a committee created against the wedding of a person this important?,” he told journalists. “I’m embarrassed of these people.”
By the start of Bezos’ wedding week, it was clear that something was different, and that the world was paying attention. On Monday, Greenpeace Italia and UK group “Everyone Hates Elon” unfurled a giant banner, more than 60 feet long and wide, in Venice’s iconic St. Mark’s Square. The banner read, “If you can rent Venice for your wedding, you can pay more tax” with an image of a laughing Bezos.
“Bezos embodies an economic and social model that is leading us to collapse,” said Simona Abbate, Greenpeace Italia’s climate and energy campaigner, in a statement. “Social injustice is ever more frequently keeping pace with climate injustice: on one side, it’s the arrogance of a few billionaires that lead devastating lifestyles for the planet, on the other, all the people that daily have to undergo the effects of the climate crisis.”
Climate group Extinction Rebellion also took to St. Mark’s Square dressed as a bride and groom and chanting “We are the 99%,” while protests in other Italian cities, like in Padua, targeted Amazon’s hubs, according to Toninello. On Saturday, at the end of the week’s festivities, activists marched through the center with signs like “No Bezos, No War” and “Kisses Yes, Bezos No.”
But activists’ biggest win came in forcing Bezos’ team to move his wedding reception from the Scuola Grande della Misericordia to the Arsenale, a more remote and less disruptive location where the Biennale is held. The move came after activists had planned to block access to the original area and the surrounding canals, Toninello said.
“This is a huge victory,” Toninello told Teen Vogue. “When we started this protest, which was intended to send a message for Venice and against Bezos, we never imagined we would get to this point. We thought that we’d take advantage of the moment to send a specific message, but we never expected to be able to ruin in some way the wedding of the third richest person in any way.”
The protests against Bezos’s wedding also became a subject of international fascination, in large part because they touched on so many of the world’s biggest issues—unfettered capitalism and the rise of the uber-rich, the increasing effects of climate change and the growing takeover of tourism in cities in which it’s hard to find a livable rent. Yet while the movement had global resonance, for activists on the ground, it was almost as much about Venice as it was about Bezos. The Amazon founder’s ability to obstruct one of the world’s most famous cities for nearly an entire week could be read as a literal exemplification of the absolute capacity of capitalism to exploit.
Bezos perhaps in some way intuited these concerns, as he made preemptive contributions of a million euros each to three Venice-related organizations: a research consortium focused on the lagoons, the Venice office of UNESCO and Venice International University, according to Vanity Fair Italia reporting. But these will have little overall effect, said Venice Council Member Marco Gasparinetti.
“These micro-donations are made to organizations that do not need them and that Venetians do not feel are necessary,” he said.
Still, he put himself in a moderate camp towards the events of last week, neither precisely for or against.
“Between the two positions [about Bezos and Sánchez’s wedding], I find myself in the middle. I’m not saying, ‘Everything’s fine, what’s the problem [with holding the wedding in Venice]?’ It could potentially create problems,” Gasparinetti said. “But I don’t want to say that this is the main problem.”
Gasparinetti’s assessment is an important one, as it frames the debate in Venice’s terms. It would certainly not be accurate to categorize the entirety of Venice as against the couple’s decision to hold their wedding there. In fact, Brugnaro even noted in a television interview with regional news station Antenna Tre that it was Venice that lobbied the Amazon founder to come to the city and not the other way around.
Still, the issue has never been about a rich, famous person getting married in Venice, according to Toninello. Multiple people interviewed mentioned the 2014 nuptials of George Clooney and Amal Alamuddin, which did not attract mass protests. It was instead about what Bezos represents to protesters—someone who attended President Donald Trump’s inauguration and who, they argue, earned his wealth on the exploitation of workers and land.
“To put it bluntly,” Toninello said, “if Bezos had come here for a stroll, we would have still gone ahead with our protest.”
Venice activists hope that last week will become a signal of what even a small group of people can do.
“We are seeing a takeover by the right wing all over the world, but at the same time, there is a response at the grassroots level,” Faye said. “People are waking up, organizing themselves to oppose this and to create an alternative.”
