Jeff Bezos’s Venetian wedding is a pageant of bad taste

As it should be.

Sunday morning, I was doing some close reading about Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s upcoming Venetian wedding. And very soon I was struck by a nagging existential sense that I should really be doing something else – or finally finishing Daniel Deronda, maybe.

Vabbè! There I was, fascinated by Venice’s perpetually truculent residents and their anti-Bezos protests. You see, the few remaining locals are terribly unhappy at the world’s third-richest man planning to marry the former TV anchor Lauren Sánchez in the city: its narrow waterways cannot sustain the crowds, they say; it is too small, too sacred, overwhelmed; Cannaregio is so much more than a playground for the rich, they add, incorrectly – this has clearly been the point of Venice since the 12th century.

Undeterred by history, protesters have draped a huge “No to Bezos” banner on the campanile of San Giorgio Maggiore. Angry posters have appeared all over the islands of the lagoon. The civic activist Marta Sottoriva told the Guardian, meanwhile, that, “This wedding is the symbol of all that is wrong with Venice.” It is the kind of hyperbole only appropriate for someone from a city that calls itself La Serenissima.

At the 11th hour, Bezos reportedly was forced to change the venue – it was due to be held in the 16th century Scuola Grande della Misericordia – after the No Space for Bezos group threatened to block guests from the entrance and, rather more whimsically, fill the canal with inflatable crocodiles.

Bleh, all so predictable. Of course the Bezos nuptials were destined for this treatment: where a haughty snobbery about new money meets a kind of post-imperial tristesse and a vague suspicion of the New World. “Anyone but the Yanks” is Europe’s most unifying refrain.

But the hard truth is that you cannot really denigrate Venice – Italy’s camp id – with something as silly as an A-list wedding (George and Amal Clooney didn’t manage it in 2014 either). Because the moody and cerebral city of Hemingway’s imagination never quite existed; it has long been a kind of kitsch adult theme park with 70 per cent better art and 100 per cent worse food.

But if you want to know about Venice you should read Jan Morris, not me. There is, however, no “inside account” of the so-called wedding of the century that has eluded my attention, no matter how far my education in George Eliot is suffering for it. Other weddings that have received such a superlative moniker: Grace Kelly to the Prince of Monaco, 1956; Charles and Diana, 1981; Kate and Will, 2011; Kim and Kanye, 2014; the modest $600m bash for the son of India’s richest man in 2024. Sharper-minded readers will have noted that not all can hold the accolade.

But they do share something. The most boring person in the room will always raise the same objection to these turbocharged pageants of bad judgement: “None of this is about love any more!” they cry. To which I say – any more? In the long, storied history of marriage, these emotional demands on the affair, love in other words, are a new and mawkish development. All six of the once-in-a-century weddings have more in common with Trump’s military parade than they do with two people getting wed in, say, Islington Town Hall: this is a consolidation of aesthetic power and imperial ambition. Love? Whatever.

I don’t want to defend a wedding between Bezos, a force of cosmic darkness, and Sánchez, a woman who has never worn an item of clothing that fits. But in a sea of self-satisfied aesthetes peering down their noses at the event, I must: it is hardly the first ugly wedding in the chronicles of romance. Not even the first in Venice. With very few noble exceptions, weddings trend towards bad taste.

In fact “bad taste” might not even cover it. The archetype is this: you are sitting in a hot tent in a field very far from home, for some reason; you have been served roast beef, plated with the dexterity of a horse; there are speeches, too long and full of unfunny wisecracks or so burdened by sentiment it invites nausea; the wine is warm. If I have to suffer all of that for the sake of the beloved couple, it might as well happen in view of a Veronese.

[See more: If literature is dead, at least the funeral is well attended]