The Sanchez/Bezos Merger: How To Get Married, Though Thousands Object

Forbes

5 hours ago

The It Couple: Lauren Sanchez and US founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, leave the Aman Hotel in Venice on June 25, 2026. Celebrities in superyachts sail into Venice this week for the three-day wedding party of Amazon tycoon Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez, despite irate locals who say the UNESCO city is no billionaire's playground. The tech magnate and journalist have reportedly invited about 200 guests to their multi-million dollar nuptials in the Italian city, which are expected to kick off on June 26 and end Saturday with a ceremony at a secret location. (Photo by Stefano Rellandini / AFP) (Photo by STEFANO RELLANDINI/AFP via Getty Images) AFP via Getty Images
Though anything but a 'normal' wedding in location, guests, detail or outlay, in its familial contours at least, the onrushing Lauren Sanchez/Jeff Bezos nuptial weekend remains a deeply ordinary American event: Big blended family, second march down the aisle for the bride, second for the groom, their (largely grown) kids hanging about, and a few trusted business associates, friends and their families queuing up to party hearty. Understandably, the lovebirds are going big with all this, and in Venice, of all places, because, again, with previous marriages behind them, they would like to declare that this time is really, truly...it. All good. Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Bezos, a June thing it is, then.
A banner showing a giant red 'X' on Jeff Bezos' name is removed from the bell tower of San Giorgio Maggiore, a small island part of Venice where the billionaire will marry is fiancee, journalist Lauren Sanchez at the end of June, on June 12, 2025. Poster campaigns and stickers have spread throughout the city, including one with images of Bezos reading "No space for Bezos" as some local residents protest claiming the city is transformed into a playground for billionaires. (Photo by ANDREA PATTARO / AFP) (Photo by ANDREA PATTARO/AFP via Getty Images) AFP via Getty Images
However. No grand soirée — no Versailles ball hosted by Madame de Pompadour, no Met Gala, no rager on Ibiza — occurs in a political or social vacuum. In the instance of this current, admittedly somewhat large affair, across town, housed in a ramshackle palazzo (doubling as an alternative nightclub) called 'Laboratorio Occupato Morion,' at No. 2951 Calle del Morion, the small but doughty 'No Space For Bezos' protest collective remains handily and happily dug in amid a plethera of other groups, calling for their adherents to bring 'crocodile' pool floats, along with goggles and snorkels in the service of a form of jolly but pointed havoc on the to-ing and fro-ing of the wedding party and guests this weekend. Not necessarily the most salubrious swim for the prospective demonstrators' health, those rather questionable lagoon-city waters, but it could be good sport.
VENICE, ITALY - JUNE 26: Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez are seen leaving the Aman Hotel in Venice ahead of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez Wedding on June 26, 2025 in Venice, Italy. (Photo by Stefano Mazzola/GC Images) GC Images
Geographically, their Calle del Morion HQ location is proof, if any were needed, that Venice's urban matrix is ultra-tight: It's just a few hundred yards north of the Arsenale, the ancient shipyard and weapons larder, now a public event space that has, ironically enough, been booked by the Sanchez/Bezos organizers for a portion of the weekend celebrations due to its lone entrance by water.
Which tactical advantage to the wedding party, in turn, is just one of the many reasons that the countervailing 'No Space For Bezos' demonstration planners have wholeheartedly embraced Venice's aquatic urban terrain, e.g., with snorkels and pool floats. By definition, anybody attempting to move through Venice will meet some, or several, bodies of water to be traversed. This fact frames the parameters of the contest between the Sanchez/Bezos organizers and security forces on the one side, and arrayed against them, the several groups planning to utilize the occasion of the weekend to publicize their causes.
US model Kendall Jenner (top) and US entrepreneur Kylie Jenner leave the Gritti Palace Hotel ahead of the wedding of Amazon's founder Jeff Bezos with Lauren Sanchez in Venice on June 26, 2026. Celebrities in superyachts sail into Venice this week for the three-day wedding party of Amazon tycoon Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez, despite irate locals who say the UNESCO city is no billionaire's playground. The tech magnate and journalist have reportedly invited about 200 guests to their multi-million dollar nuptials in the Italian city, which are expected to kick off on June 26 and end Saturday with a ceremony at a secret location. (Photo by Marco BERTORELLO / AFP) (Photo by MARCO BERTORELLO/AFP via Getty Images) AFP via Getty Images
In the largest strategic sense, the wedding party's Achilles heel is its size, shoe-horned in upon Venice's arthritic pre-medieval matrix. Ignoring for the moment the many dozens of service and security personnel required to stage functions such as this (and their crucial need to get around), no Venice canal except for the Grand and a handful of others can tolerate a launch big enough to board the wedding couple and their 200-odd guests at once. Every movement of that crowd must, per force, be made in bits, and thus fragmented, it becomes exponentially harder for the Sanches/Bezos team to secure that movement. This is the reason that the organizers booked 40 of Venice's gorgeous mahogany motoscafi, the private launches and their expert pilots, for the duration. Worse comes to worst, they can flat outrun anything trying to interdict them.
Acquatically, then, the game becomes one of chokepoints. Pictured below, Greenpeace's admonishment to the groom, a ground banner unfurled in St. Mark's square on June 23.
Activists of international environmental group Greenpeace deploy a giant banner displaying a picture of Jeff Bezos and reading "If you can rent Venice for your wedding you can pay more tax" at St Mark square in Venice on June 23, 2025. Venice will host the wedding of Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos and journalist Lauren Sanchez before the end of the month with more than 200 guests expected to attend. (Photo by Stefano Rellandini / AFP) (Photo by STEFANO RELLANDINI/AFP via Getty Images) AFP via Getty Images
Pictured second from top, the 'No Space For Bezos' banner is being lowered from the bell tower of Santa Giorgio Maggiore on June 13, which happens to be the basilica on the tiny island off the tip of Giudecca where the core service acknowledging the Sanchez/Bezos union is reported to be scheduled. Parenthetically, it will remain an irony of the weekend that, whatever transpires the San Giorgio Maggiore basilica and/or in any of the weekend's other splendid venues, it's been reported that the couple's troth has long been pled and entered (with full legal effect), alongside the finalization of a crucial, attendant pre-nup, back home in the good ol' USA.
Put differently, no Italian law or obfuscatory European Union clerical minutae dare intrude by virtue of the romantic European location in which the wedding will be celebrated, thank you very much. At the stratospheric atmospheres in which the Sanchez/Bezos family operates, pre-nups can require the legal dog teams to pull the weighty sled of the fortune across some forbidding personal and civil terrain. It seems as if that's done and dusted.
The more immediate point is that the 'No Space For Bezos' people are deeply local. Their specific knowledge of sites and access points is their strength, which very much does not mean that the Italian organizers, hoteliers, restaurateurs, security services, and municipal authorities who are integral to the celebration do not, also, know the intricacies of the Lagoon and its jewel-box city. They do.
Rather, the point is that this weekend's thrust and parry between the party versus their numerous party-poopers will be more sophisticated than we might imagine. It's significant that Venice has a 400-year tradition of mask-making and masquerade balls — which is to say, the town is nothing if not about intrigue. Furthermore, this weekend's contest is certainly not as simple as big-dude-sails-in-with-his-woman-on-his-big-boat-and-bigfoots-Venice, as some the opposing forces to the weekend's celebration would have it. In fact, Venice, the old late-Byzantine trading colossus, has arguably hosted thousands of bigger and finer party weekends in over its milliennium-and-a-half reign as the pearl atop the crown of the Adriatic. Partying, and courtly intrigue, is a thousand-year-old Venetian mark in trade. A swift refreshing stroll through Othello should remind us of that.
For their part, having spent the last weeks on the 415-foot Koru meandering up the Dalmatian coast toward Venice, at the last minute (seemingly), the couple decided to leave the boat on the northern Croatian coast before choppering over the head of the Adriatic and dropping into Venice on June 25. Of all the tactical decisions they could have made around the weekend, this one reeks of intelligence in every sense, indicating knowledge of the gathering stormclouds against the weekend's celebrations, as well as indicating the keenness with which that knowledge is put to defensive use.
Put bluntly, underway, on the high Med, the Koru presents a relatively fleet and negligible target. But in addition to its eye-watering football-field-and-then-some length, the Koru has a 55-foot beam and an understandable, but still gargantuan, 18-and-a-half-foot draft. There aren't many places in Venetian lagoon that can handle that. So: Moored in Venice for three days straight and hardly missable, the Koru — unanimously regarded as an extravagant toy by 100% of the protest groups — would have only become a $500-million sitting duck requiring massive 24/7 security, in effect actually begging for any number of protest groups' dinghy crews, or scuba specialists, to pop over and festoon its classy navy-blue hull with any amount of paint, signage or graffiti for their causes.
The weekend is by no means over, but one extremely private ultra-Venetian venue has been thoroughly and seamlessly enjoyed, on June 26, with a dinner for the couple and their guests at the immense and immensely luxurious Palazzo Brandolini, presiding over the south bank of the Grand Canal. In many different ways — culturally, politically, socially, as well as topographically — the place is unassailable.
Background: The Palazzo is owned by Cristiana Brandolini D'Abbo, the nonagenarian sister of the late Fiat chair Gianni Angeli and aunt to Prince Egon von Furstenberg, the first husband of designer Diane von Furstenberg Von Furstenburg herself has been coming to this house since she was a young married, and now spends months every year here. She and her current husband Barry Diller rent the palazzo's piano nobile , the 'noble' or first floor, with its enormous reception and dining rooms, and for the last decade have hosted the Diller von Furstenburg (DVF) Family Foundation award events here.
In a larger way, Diller and von Furstenburg represent a Venetian template for Bezos and Sanchez, which is why an eve-of dinner in the Palazzo Brandolini for the wedding party kickoff was apt. Diller has long advised Bezos, Diller and von Furstenburg have hosted Sanchez and Bezos in Venice before, and along the way, the three-masted Koru was, after much study by Bezos, modeled on the schooner-rigged three-masted Diller yacht Eos . Glassware for the von Furstenburg/Diller party and for the weekend in general is being provided by Cristiana's grandson Marcantonio Brandolini, whose roots can be traced back fifteen hundred years to a Brandolini ancestor who fought the Goth invasion in the mid-500s.
The point is this: Yes, the nationality of the this weekend's betrothed is American. Yes, they have quite a bit of money. But their connections to the town and its broad community of global citizens go a quite a bit deeper than first meets the eye. As cosmopolitan as Venice is, as historically important as one of Europe's post-Roman, grand medieval and Renaissance trading posts, the town remains a tough nut to crack, socially speaking. Whatever disruption, minor or major, this weekend's protest efforts may attain, the newly wedded couple have dug taproots in town that cannot be easily pulled. Because: Deeper into Venice's Grand Canal traditions and families than the Palazzo Brandolini is hard to get.
The group 'No Space For Bezos' created their rather catchy name on the fly, plucked with a bit of spark from the fact that what's come to be called 'over-tourism' has in fact been crowding out the natives, artisans, business people and regular workers from charming towns across the northern littoral of the Mediterannean — from the Costa del Sol right through Italy and Greece to the shores of Anatolia. First Venice, then Barcelona — where tourists of all stripes are now routinely hosed down in protest by locals armed with water pistols — have fallen victim to the effects of mass tourism.
They do have a point. The Med is a gorgeous place and a wellspring of global, and Western, culture. Like many other such places, inevitably, it's becoming less and less authentic. Whatever else it is or might be, the Sanchez/Bezos wedding is not the wellspring of that.