Romano Cited in The Atlantic Article on Bezos Wedding

June 30, 2025

This June, Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez held an extravagant wedding weekend in Venice, a city long associated with wealth, grandeur and global commerce. Their festivities—including events on a superyacht, gatherings in historic churches and luxury hotels, and a ceremony on a secluded island—drew numerous celebrity guests and reportedly cost well over $20 million.

Venice, now heavily dependent on tourism and facing environmental strain, saw local protests against the wedding even as such high-profile attention is expected to attract still more visitors.

Modern Venice is “an amusement park,” according to Professor Emeritus of History Dennis Romano, who recently wrote a book on the city. Romano predicts that the wedding and its attendant publicity will likely just drive more tourists to the city.

Read more in The Atlantic article, “The Dark Poetry of the Bezos Wedding.”