The Gritti Palace was built in Venice in 1475, with no expense spared. Its chandeliers are made of handblown Murano glass, its bathrooms of polychrome Italian marble. Its terrace looks out over the Grand Canal onto a domed basilica. For years, it was home to Venetian nobility, but now it’s a luxury hotel, where suites can cost €14,000 a night. Last weekend, it was booked solid by a new kind of nobility, in Venice for a new kind of no-expense-spared spectacle: the wedding of Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and fourth-richest man in the world, and Lauren Sánchez, a former TV presenter.
Gritti Palace于1475年在威尼斯建造，没有支出。它的枝形吊灯由手工穆拉诺玻璃和多色块意大利大理石浴室制成。它的露台俯瞰大型大教堂上的大型大教堂。多年来，它一直是威尼斯人贵族的家，但现在是一家豪华酒店，套房每晚的价格为14,000欧元。上周末，它是由一种新型贵族固定的，在威尼斯，为一种新型的无息镜眼镜：杰夫·贝索斯（Jeff Bezos）的婚礼，亚马逊创始人和世界上最富裕的第四大男人，以及前电视节目主持人劳伦·萨恩奇斯（LaurenSánchez）。
The Trumps have Rome; the Bezos-Sánchez family, apparently, has Venice. In at least one way, the city is an apt wedding venue for one of this era’s most successful merchants. It’s an archipelago of sandy islands in shoal waters that, largely thanks to Venice’s placement at the head of the Adriatic, became one of the Mediterranean's dominant ports and one of civilization’s first centers of global commerce, through which the world’s spices, silk, fur, and jewels flowed for centuries. It was, in other words, a city that became important not because of what it made but because of what you could buy there, the beneficiary of right-place-right-time magic that someone like Bezos might today call synergy.
特朗普有罗马。显然，贝佐斯 - 桑切斯家族有威尼斯。从至少一种方式上，这座城市是这个时代最成功的商人之一的恰当婚礼场地。这是浅滩水域中桑迪群岛的一个群岛，这在很大程度上要归功于威尼斯在亚得里亚海领先的位置，成为地中海的主要港口之一，也成为文明的首个全球商业中心之一，通过该中心，世界上的香料，丝绸，丝，毛茸茸和珠宝流向了百年纪念。换句话说，这是一个变得重要的城市，不是因为它所做的，而是因为您可以在那里购买的东西，这是像Bezos这样的右手右翼魔术的受益者，今天可能会称呼Synergy。
Read: Welcome to wedding sprawl
阅读：欢迎来到婚礼蔓延
For many years, it was one of Europe’s richest cities, defined by its ostentation and swagger, the spoils of all that wealth: mansions filled with art, basilicas filled with stolen artifacts, marble and gold everywhere you looked, impossible magnificence rising from unstable ground. Today, Venice’s primary industry is tourism, and its primary export is its own mythology. The Renaissance-era tradesmen are long gone; in their place are people there to gawk at what the Renaissance-era tradesmen bought. Modern Venice is “an amusement park,” as the historian Dennis Romano, who recently wrote a book on the city, told me. It’s a living museum of obscene wealth. It’s whatever the opposite of quiet luxury is. It’s big and literal, unapologetic and unrestrained, a type of old-world vulgarity newly back in style, at least among people so powerful that they don’t need to care about taste. (Should Ivanka Trump, a wedding guest, have happened to look up while killing an afternoon at the Gallerie dell’Accademia this past weekend, she might have recognized something: The gold-leaf ceiling in the living room at Mar-a-Lago was explicitly modeled after one at the art museum.)
多年以来，它是欧洲最富有的城市之一，其象征和夸张，所有财富的战利品：充满艺术的豪宅，充满了被盗文物的巴西里卡斯，到处都是大理石和黄金，您看上去的不可能的宏伟壮丽从不稳定的地面上升出来。今天，威尼斯的主要产业是旅游业，其主要出口是其自己的神话。文艺复兴时期的商人早已一去不复返了。他们的位置是那里的人，因为那里的文艺复兴时期的商人购买了什么。现代威尼斯是“游乐园”，因为历史学家丹尼斯·罗曼诺（Dennis Romano）最近在这座城市上写了一本书。这是一个活着的淫秽财富博物馆。安静的奢侈品与众不同。它是一个大而字面的，毫无歉意的，不受限制的，一种新颖的旧世界，至少在如此强大的人中，他们不需要关心口味。（如果上周末，伊万卡·特朗普（Ivanka Trump）是一名婚礼嘉宾，碰巧在杀死一个下午的一个下午的时候抬头抬起头来，她可能已经认识到了一些事情：Mar-a-Lago的客厅里的金叶天花板明确地在艺术博物馆的一个之后仿照。）
The wedding festivities began with a foam party on a $500 million superyacht, continued with a welcome event at a church whose walls are lined with Tintorettos, and culminated with a Friday-night ceremony on the same secluded island where the G7 once met. The Gritti and other high-end hotels were filled with guests including Leonardo DiCaprio, Oprah Winfrey, and several Kardashian/Jenner sisters. Estimates have placed the cost of the whole event at somewhere possibly far north of $20 million. If the vibe of the wedding was, at least to some observers, tacky, that’s beside the point. Venice is rich—world-historically rich, one of the richest places money can buy. It’s a place where even the bathrooms are exquisite, where every square inch is drenched in beauty, where a wedding guest or a former TV news anchor can feel like royalty. Of course Bezos and Sánchez wanted to marry there.
婚礼庆祝活动始于一场耗资5亿美元的超级游艇的泡沫派对，继续在教堂举行了一场欢迎活动，该教堂的墙壁上衬有Tintorettos，并在G7曾经见面的同一个僻静的岛屿上举行了周五晚上的仪式。Gritti和其他高端酒店都到处都是莱昂纳多·迪卡普里奥（Leonardo DiCaprio），奥普拉·温弗瑞（Oprah Winfrey）和几个卡戴珊（Kardashian）/詹纳姐妹（Jenner Sisters）等客人。估计将整个活动的成本置于可能以远至2000万美元以北的某个地方。如果婚礼的氛围至少在某些观察者身上是俗气的，那就是这一点。威尼斯很富有 - 世界上富裕，是金钱可以买到的最富有的地方之一。在这个地方，即使是浴室都很精致，每平方英寸都浸透了美女，婚礼客人或以前的电视新闻主播都可以感觉像皇室。当然，贝佐斯（Bezos）和桑切斯（Sánchez）想在那里结婚。
Read: What Venice can teach American cities
阅读：什么威尼斯可以教美国城市
Still, there’s something funny about it all: a couple whose wealth is derived from modern convenience tying the knot in a place so thoroughly, proudly antiquated; Bezos, a man responsible for unleashing thousands of delivery vehicles onto American streets, getting married in a city with no cars. Sánchez recently climbed into a rocket ship and flew to the edge of space, but for one of the most important days of her life, she chose a city where the most efficient way to get around is to hire a guy in stripes to locomote you using a method that has existed since before Jesus was born.
尽管如此，这一切还是很有趣的：一对夫妇的财富源于现代便利，将结绑在一个如此彻底，自豪地过时的地方。贝佐斯（Bezos）是一名负责将数千辆运送车辆释放到美国街道上的男子，在没有汽车的城市中结婚。桑切斯（Sánchez）最近爬上了一艘火箭船，飞到了太空的边缘，但是在她一生中最重要的日子之一中，她选择了一个城市，在这里，最有效的方法是雇用一个穿着条纹的家伙在耶稣出生以前已经存在的方法来狂奔。
Venice is now a sinking place, a place being destroyed by modernity and consumption—pollution, climate change, mega-tourism. Moto ondoso—“wave motion”—from large boats is eroding the centuries-old foundations of the city’s buildings. Venice has about 20 million tourists a year, and fewer than 50,000 annual residents. Many of those in town protested the Bezos-Sánchez wedding: They papered over the city’s ancient stone walls with flyers suggesting that Bezos leave, sent effigies of him floating down the canals, and unfurled a massive banner that read, If you can rent Venice for your wedding you can pay more tax. Romano predicts (as do I) that the wedding and its attendant publicity will likely just drive more tourists to the city. Everyone, after all, loves an amusement park—especially people with plenty of money to burn.
威尼斯现在是一个沉没的地方，一个被现代性和消费摧毁的地方 - 污染，气候变化，巨型旅游。从大型船上的“波动运动”摩托车（Moto Ondoso）正在侵蚀该城市建筑物的几个世纪基础。威尼斯每年约有2000万游客，年度居民不到50,000。镇上的许多人都抗议了贝佐斯·萨恩奇斯（Bezos-Sánchez）的婚礼：他们在城市的古老石墙上纸上纸张，表明贝佐斯（Bezos）离开，送他的雕像从运河上飘落，并放下读书的大型横幅，如果您可以租用威尼斯的婚礼，则可以缴纳更多税款。罗曼诺（Romano）预测（我也是如此），婚礼及其随之而来的宣传可能只会将更多的游客带到这座城市。毕竟，每个人都喜欢一个游乐园，尤其是有很多钱可燃烧的人。
