Demonstrators display a banner reading 'No Space for Bezos!' on the Rialto Bridge during a protest in June against Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos's coming nuptials to Lauren Sanchez.Manuel Silvestri/Reuters
Italy is full of playgrounds for the rich and famous. Capri in the Bay of Naples, Positano on the Amalfi coast and Portofino on the Ligurian coast brim in the summer with oligarchs, millionaire tech bros and Hollywood stars with their yachts. Italians don’t care. If some wealthy balding guy at a seaside club is happy to pay €30 – about 50 bucks – for spaghetti alle vongole that costs €10 anywhere else, more fool he.
Venice is different. It is a UNESCO heritage site, the former capital of a vast maritime empire, and a uniquely car-free city that is full of cherished artistic treasures, from Titian to Tintoretto. It is not just an anchorage for yachts set against a postcard-perfect backdrop. Yet Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and world’s third-richest man, stands accused by the dwindling number of true Venetians of using their city as a theme park that can be flogged to the highest bidder.
Mr. Bezos picked Venice for his wedding to former journalist Lauren Sanchez. The Italian media is obsessed with the event. None of the details are confirmed, but the endless reports say the couple will splash out US$10-million for the wedding later this month; that a star attraction will be his US$500-million superyacht Koru; that the guests will include Kim Kardashian, Leonardo DiCaprio and Ivanka Trump; that their rooms will cost €9,000 a night; and that the wedding party has booked all of the Venetian lagoon’s water taxis plus the island of San Giorgio.
Protests against overtourism draw thousands in southern Europe
The more serious side to gawking is that the wedding has become a symbol of the type of tourism that has turned Venice and many of Europe’s other lovely cities and towns into expensive Las Vegas-style stages mobbed with visitors and robbed of local character. As Mr. Bezos and his party occupy parts of Venice, waves of day trippers arrive by train, bus and cruise ship to overwhelm Rome, Florence, Dubrovnik, Barcelona, Porto, Athens, Nice, Amsterdam, Edinburgh and elsewhere. Data from Euromonitor International says that Dubrovnik, on the Croatian coast, has a tourist-to-resident ratio of 27:1.
Is this the kind of economy that local and national governments want?
Apparently, yes, for there are few controls on everything from Airbnbs to cruise ships, no vision to add value to urban economies beyond stuffing as many visitors as possible into historic centres, and only scant plans to improve local infrastructure, public transportation, recycling and water and sewage systems to cope with the avalanches of humanity from afar.
Venetians are hanging anti-Bezos posters and threatening to block the canals when his wedding entourage arrives.ANDREA PATTARO/AFP/Getty Images
Tax enforcement on income generated by short-term rentals is another area in desperate need of attention. Last year, the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, an academic journal published by the University of Washington, noted that only 24 per cent of Airbnb listings in the 100 largest short-term-rental market in the U.S. voluntarily comply with local sales tax regulations. The ratio could be even lower in parts of Europe, such as Italy and Greece, where tax evasion is known to be extensive.
The return of mass tourism since the COVID-19 pandemic faded away three years ago has generally been promoted as a bonus to the cities and towns which had turned into echo chambers during the shutdowns. Tourism is back with a vengeance and many studies have been published on its ill effects on local communities. As properties devoted to short-term rentals increase, property prices and rents rise, making it difficult for residents to find accommodation. So, they leave.
Rome, to take but one city, is an exercise in decline. Families who have lived in the heart of Rome for generations are packing up. The population of the historic centre has fallen by 20,000, to less than 170,000 in the past three decades, with most of the decline coming in the past 10 years or so, roughly coinciding with the arrival of Airbnb. (The population of metro Rome is 4.3 million). The defenders of the city call the short-term rental saturation urban “desertification.” Useful shops like butchers, hardware stores and drycleaners are replaced by pubs, fast-food restaurants and souvenir shops.
Pushback is coming, finally. Venice has banned large cruise ships and, in 2023, became the world’s first city to introduce an entrance fee for day trippers on the busiest days (the fee has doubled to €10.) Barcelona has become ground zero for Europe’s anti-tourist campaign. It will eliminate all its 10,000 short-term rental licences by 2028 and the national government has ordered the removal of more than 60,000 illegal holiday homes from short-term rental sites.
Anti-tourist protests are picking up momentum. On June 15, thousands of residents in Spain, Portugal and Italy took to the streets to demand that their governments clamp down on mass tourism and the spread of Airbnbs. Some of the protestors used squirt guns to douse tourists. They held signs that read “Your Airbnb was my home,” or “One more tourist, one less resident.”
And Mr. Bezos? He’s attracting protesters, too. Venetians are hanging anti-Bezos posters on bell towers and threatening to block the canals when his wedding entourage arrives. Mr. Bezos may be enormously wealthy, but in the Venetians’ view, he will be just another tourist disrupting local life and taking selfies.