Photo: Bloomberg via Getty Images

Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez’s lavish wedding in Venice, Italy, is less than two weeks away, and the billionaire couple is already running into issues. Amid widespread anti-tourism protests across Europe this past weekend, citizens of Venice expressed their distaste for the upcoming destination wedding. Multiple banners were hoisted up onto the city’s historic fixtures, including a “No Space for Bezos” sign on the Rialto Bridge and another with a big red X over “Bezos” hung on the steeple of the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore. Not exactly a warm Italian welcome.

Venetians aren’t just painting signs — they’re ready to be a disruptive force June 26–29, when the events are reportedly taking place and hundreds of rich celebrities (including Sánchez’s Bride Tribe) will descend on the Floating City. Amid rumors that one of the wedding venues in question could be the Misericordia, Federica Toninello, a protest organizer, said, “Bezos will never get to the Misericordia,” according to the New York Times. “We will line the streets with our bodies, block the canals with lifesavers, dinghies, and our boats.”

The couple didn’t pick the Italian city willy-nilly. Morris Ceron, director general of the Venice Council, told the London Times that he campaigned for the wedding to be held there after hearing about it from Domenic Dolce of Dolce & Gabbana. “We were in competition with other places, but we won out,” Luigi Brugnaro, the city’s mayor, said.

Although Venice is home to tourist weddings every year, locals aren’t exactly happy with their government rolling out the red carpet for the fourth-richest man in the world. “Let’s make sure that Venice is not remembered as a postcard venue where Bezos had his wedding but as the city that did not bend to oligarchs,” protester Na Haby Stella Faye said, per the Times. “We have a chance to disrupt a ten million dollar wedding — let’s do it.”

Welp, buona fortuna to the happy couple!