Bezos' Venice wedding - much ado about very little

I'm not sure that I should be elevating this to the heady heights of "important news", but Jeff Bezos' inpending wedding to Lauren Sánchez has captured the public's attention, mainly for all the wrong reasons. 

When I first heard about it, it was couched in terms like "Jeff Bezos has booked all of Venice for his wedding", and I too was suitably incensed (well, slightly annoyed, truth be told). It seemed cheesy, over-the-top, and just the kind of stunt you would expect a billionaire recently-converted Trump-lover to pull.

There have been the predictable protests against the Amazon boss and his journalist/newscaster fiancée, including by Greenpeace Italy, Everyone Hates Elon, and a new group calling itself No Space For Bezos. There are threats to fill the canals with inflatable crocodiles. Venice is already a city suffering from over-tourism, and the locals are quite sensitive on the subject.

Most recently, these groups are boasting of an "enormous victory" when the venue for the culminating event was suddenly moved from the sumptuous Scuola Grande della Misericordia to the Arsenale, which is supposedly further from the centre. How this is an "enormous victory" I'm not sure, and on consulting a map of Venice, I'm not even that sure it's further from the centre, if the centre is defined as the Piazza San Marco and the Palazzo Ducale (the Arsenale looks closer to me, if anything). It may be more easily secured, but that's another matter.

That being said, the wedding seems to be far from taking over the whole city, as we have been led to believe. Yes, private jets are expected to jam up the city's airport and mega-yachts to block the harbour for a day or two, and five whole hotels have been booked out in their entirety, even though the guest list is limited to a relatively modest and exclusive 200 guests (including the usual famous-for-being-famous types, like Kim Kardashian, Mick Jagger, Ivanka Trump and Leonardo diCaprio, who are almost certainly not bosom buddies with either spouse-to-be). There are unconfirmed reports that Bezos has booked ALL of the water taxis in town for the event, which could be a bit awkward for other visitors, I guess.

Local officials and councillors actually seem to be quite favourable towards the weddding, which they say will bring major economic benefits to the city, adding that the events are all being held in privately-owned venues, not in publicly-owned palaces or galleries.

Now, I'm no fan of Mr. Bezos, and I routinely try as much as possible to avoid Amazon (which, as an organization, has a whole bunch of legitimate concerns). But it's kind of hard to object too strenuously to a 200-person wedding held on private property, which most of the locals seem generally in favour of. Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing was actually set in Messina, Sicily, not Venice, but I think the sentiment probably still applies.