Oh, Cry Me a Canal!

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Posted June 27, 2025

By Sean Ring

Ahh… Venice – the sinking city of gondolas, ghostly palazzos, and now… performative outrage.

Oh, it’s a feast for your eyes… Perhaps the most visually striking city on earth. I couldn’t believe how sensational the city looked the first time I saw it in 1997. When I visited again in 2013, I was equally in awe. There’s no diminishing reward when it comes to Venice. It hits you with the same visual force every time you see it. I’m due for another trip soon, and this time, it’s only a train ride away. But not until these whiny protesters skip town.

Over the past three days, Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez hosted their star-studded wedding celebration in Venice, inviting a couple of hundred of their closest, fabulously wealthy friends to toast eternal love and unimaginable net worth. There were yachts. There were Aperol spritzes. There was even a foam party. But you know what stole the show?

A ragtag brigade of grumbling activists shouting that Venice is not for rent.

That’s rich.

Let’s put this into perspective: Venice has a local population of just over 49,000, about the size of beautiful downtown Jeffersonville, Indiana. And with few industries left outside of trinket peddling, hotel management, and gondolier tourism, visitors prop up 90% of the city’s economy. This floating museum doesn’t produce microchips or export LNG. Venice exists so that people will come, spend money, and leave in awe (and debt).

But when the world’s most efficient deliveryman—the guy who made it possible for Italians to get adult diapers, Neapolitan pizza cutters, and Sophia Loren biographies delivered to their door within 48 hours—wants to spend his billions in their town, the locals shout, “NO SPACE FOR BEZOS!”

You’d think old Jeff tried to drain the Grand Canal and turn it into a delivery truck superhighway.

Instead, the billionaire couple rented out legitimate venues—like the Cini Foundation’s San Giorgio Maggiore island, and originally, the stunning Scuola Vecchia della Misericordia—for what amounts to a high-end party with some big names, bigger sunglasses, and even bigger tips for the local service staff. But no: the protests, banners, and performance-art whining reached such a pitch that they had to move the reception to the Arsenale, the city’s old shipyard.

So let’s summarize. Venice, which needs money to fund basic services, floods, and fix the ever-crumbling Renaissance wallpaper of its heritage buildings, told a man worth over $200 billion: “You can rent our rooms, our boats, and our prestige—but not our love.”

How incredibly left-wing of them...

Let Them Eat Tiramisu!

The protest group "No Space for Bezos" teamed up with Greenpeace and the charmingly named “Everyone Hates Elon” to unfurl dramatic banners around town, one reading:

“IF YOU CAN RENT VENICE FOR YOUR WEDDING, YOU CAN PAY MORE TAX.”

Let’s unpack that gem.

Bezos already pays tax. Amazon pays tax. Bezos gives away billions, funds space exploration, charities, and God knows how many yacht-building jobs. And he’s spending money in Venice, a place so desperate for cash it started charging tourists an entry fee. If anything, this wedding was the tax.

And yet, the protesters acted as if he had bulldozed the Doge’s Palace and built an Amazon fulfillment center in its place.

They blocked canals, disrupted routes, and claimed victory when the event moved out of the historic center. This is what passes for activism now—preventing billionaires from renting a building in a city that sells itself as an elite destination on every travel site known to man.

Oh, and let’s not forget the glorious irony of anti-capitalist university students posting about their protest on smartphones that probably arrived in Venice via Amazon Prime.

The Self-Inflicted Poverty Complex

Here’s the inconvenient truth: if Venice wants to survive, it needs capital—lots of it. Not romantic nostalgia, not angry tweets, not rent-a-boat revolutionaries. Capital. And Jeff Bezos’ wedding delivered it in spades.

It brought global attention, luxury spending, and employment to a city whose primary export is a feeling. You don’t get a P&L boost from vibes. But you might if the second-richest man on earth decides to bless your struggling lagoon with a glittering boost to your GDP.

Instead, the city’s shrillest voices - and, undoubtedly, Britain’s most annoying ones who were only a 2-hour flight away - decided to vilify the one man whose very business model proved that anything—including wedding party favors, Italian lace gowns, and biodegradable confetti—can be delivered on time, under budget, and in style.