The New Yorker:

The monks of Venice’s San Giorgio Maggiore have hosted Cosimo de Medici in exile and a papal conclave, but they won’t be throwing any rice at Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez.

By Max Norman

From the bell tower on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore—just a third of a mile, but centuries away from the selfie sticks of Piazza San Marco—you can see nearly all of Venice. And all of Venice can see you. So activists discovered when, on June 12th, they ascended the structure and unfurled a huge banner bearing the word “BEZOS,” which had been crossed out with a big red “X.” The image went straight from the campanile to CNN.

Jeff Bezos was set to celebrate his lavish wedding to Lauren Sánchez at the Fondazione Cini, a cultural institution on the island which occupies a large part of a Benedictine monastery established there in 982 A.D. The bell tower still belongs to the monks, who have lived on the island for more than a thousand years. They’ve hosted Cosimo de Medici in exile and a papal conclave. They’ve endured wars and plagues, the Fascists and the cruise ships. But the impending visit by the world’s third-richest man had infuriated some of the locals, who regard the blowout as another indication that the city prioritizes rich V.I.P.s over real Venetians. “Couldn’t he have chosen an isolated villa in Beverly Hills?” the monastery’s abbot, Stefano Visintin, asked an Italian reporter.

The three monks who currently reside on San Giorgio didn’t seem too concerned. On the Sunday before the wedding, two of them—the abbot emeritus Padre Norberto Villa and his colleague Padre Paolo Maria Censori—filed into the Chapel of the Dead to celebrate Mass. Robed in white, they walked over marble tombs containing the bones of their predecessors and got to work beneath Tintoretto’s “Entombment of Christ” (1594). Was it coincidence that, after Mass, Dom Norberto, still riffing on his homily about God’s power to satisfy spiritual hunger, invoked the digital networks that built Bezos’s fortune and those of so many of his wedding guests?

 

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