Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez’s wedding in Venice kicks off with celebrities and protesters

VENICE, Italy — The superyachts are moored up, the private jets have touched down and the celebrities, athletes and business leaders are in Venice for one of the most talked-about weddings of the year — that of billionaire Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez.

Oprah Winfrey, Kim and Khloe Kardashian, Tom Brady, Bill Gates and President Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner are in the “city of love,” along with Queen Rania of Jordan and Leonardo DiCaprio, for the three days of lavish celebrations that began Thursday with a star-studded gala.

Bezos, the world’s fourth-richest man, and Sanchez beamed and waved at members of the public as they stepped out onto a water taxi ahead of the event at the cloisters behind the city’s Chiesa della Madonna dell’Orto church.

Nearby, a boat full of paparazzi eagerly snapped pictures of the pair before they entered the secluded venue.

The main wedding bash will be held Saturday in one of the halls of the Arsenale, a large former medieval shipyard turned into an art space in the eastern Castello district.

We are used to managing very important events,” Deputy Venice Mayor Simone Venturini told NBC News on Wednesday as the city geared up for the wedding, adding that the city previously hosted the late Pope Francis and world leaders attending the G7 and G20 summits.

In an earlier interview, he also recalled that the city had managed actor George Clooney and human rights lawyer Amal Alamuddin’s 2014 wedding, as crowds lined the canals and hundreds of well-wishers gathered outside City Hall.

Unlike the Clooney wedding however, he said, Bezos’ wedding would not be legal under Italian law because it needed “to be done in an official place like the City Hall.” Neither Bezos nor Sanchez, a former TV news anchor, had requested this, he said.

As a result, some have speculated that the couple have already legally wed in the United States.

Not everyone in the city is as welcoming as Venturini. In recent weeks, there have been protests about the Amazon founder’s presence in the city, with those who object displaying the banner “No Space for Bezos,” a play on words referring to his space exploration company, Blue Origin.

Around a dozen Venetian organizations including anti-cruise ship campaigners and housing advocates, have been joined by larger activist groups like Greenpeace, which unfurled a giant tarp in the city’s famous St. Mark’s Square on Monday, with a picture of a smiling Bezos underneath the words: “If you can rent Venice for your wedding you can pay more taxes.

While police quickly removed the banner, which Greenpeace said was approximately 4,300 square feet in size, activists have also unfurled a banner on Venice’s famous Rialto bridge and floated a Bezos-inspired mannequin, its hands clenching fake money, down one of the city’s canals on top of an Amazon delivery box.

Bezos, who according to Forbes has a net worth of $231 billion, stepped down as Amazon CEO in 2021, saying he wished to spend more time on other projects, including his Blue Origin space technology company, The Washington Post and philanthropic initiatives.

Two years earlier, Bezos, who normally shies away from the limelight, announced he was divorcing his first wife, Mackenzie Scott, days before the National Enquirer published a story about his affair with Sanchez.

On the day Bezos’ divorce was finalized, Sanchez filed for her own divorce from media executive Patrick Whitesell.

Venturini said the protesters had seen “a lot of paparazzi and a lot of visibility and attention from the world wide network and they said, ‘Let’s exploit this attention.’”

He added that Bezos had made several donations to organizations that worked to protect the Venetian lagoon system and heritage sites.

In the meantime, it’s business as usual in this city that gets approximately 30 million visitors every year, according to tour guide Igor Scomparin. He said Sunday that it was “not easy” to keep things moving in a city that is only twice the size of New York’s Central Park.

He added that he didn’t think the wedding was “going to be an issue” because it was “something to show off to the world how beautiful Venice is, but also that Venice can deal with the logistics.”

Venturini agreed, saying that he hoped that after the wedding and honeymoon, Bezos would come back and say, “I fell in love with the city. How can I help you more?”