If you’ve scrolled through a social media feed some time in the last few weeks, you’ve likely seen at least one post divulging the details of pop superstar Dua Lipa and her now-husband actor Callum Turner’s lavish Sicilian wedding celebrations.
There’s a smaller but not insignificant chance that you’ve also glimpsed evidence of the, shall we say, disgruntlement felt by some local Sicilians towards the celebrity nuptials – we’re talking outraged posters and graffiti next to closed-off streets.
The three-day wedding took place over the first weekend in June, and in the week following, searches for the destination soared by 94 percent. But, given the island already welcomes more than 20 million visitors a year (and is one of the most-visited islands in the Med), did it really need any more global attention? And should the super-rich be taking more responsibility for the impact their outlandish weddings have on local neighbourhoods?
Everybody’s over overtourism
Europe is buckling under the weight of tourism – that’s been well established. The last couple of summers have seen anti-tourism protests across major cities, which included blockades around popular attractions, picket lines at airports and even squirting visitors with water pistols.
Many destinations across the continent are grappling with how to strike the right balance between embracing tourism and managing it more effectively. Italy is one of the worst-affected places – in 2025, it welcomed a staggering 476 million visitors.
In the last 12 months alone, has reported on everything from the establishment of residents-only zones in South Tyrol and caps on the size of groups in Capri to the banning of key lockboxes in Milan, new entry fees for the Trevi Fountain in Rome and Juliet’s Balcony in Verona, as well as, of course, the relaunch of Venice’s controversial tourist tax. All of them are restrictions implemented in the name of better managing the impact of visitors on the lives of locals.
Along with Milan, Genoa, Venice and Naples, Palermo was one of five Italian destinations where people turned out last summer to air their grievances about overtourism.
But counter-tourism measures aren’t the only way Italy is trying to mitigate its visitor numbers. A number of initiatives are in place to instead shift tourism to lesser-visited destinations in the country, including the non-profit association I Borghi più belli d’Italia, which spotlights Italy’s most beautiful villages, and vintage tourist trains that traverse less popular regions and smaller rural communities.
‘Am I saying you copied me by getting married in Italy?’
Lavish celebrity weddings are nothing new, and Italy has long been a popular destination for the nuptials of some of the planet’s most famous faces. Kim Kardashian, famously followed by her sister Kourtney Kardashian, both got married in Italy (with Andrea Bocelli performing at each wedding, obviously), and after a distinctly Brat-coded wedding in East London last summer, Charli xcx and George Daniel also took to Sicily – to Tonnara di Scopello, specifically – to continue their celebrations.
But Dua Lipa and Callum Turner’s wedding has been met with a particularly strong level of frustration from locals, being that it took place in a city already blighted by overtourism.
It’s been reported that parts of Palermo, such as Piazza Sant’Anna and Piazza Croce dei Vespri, were restricted as a result of the wedding, leaving locals unable to access the interconnected public squares in central Palermo and facing issues with parking.
After protest posters were taken down, people instead graffitied their frustrations with signs reading: ‘Palermo is not for rent’. It’s reminiscent of anti-tourism graffiti increasingly seen in popular European cities over recent years, with scrawls reading ‘Tourism kills neighbourhoods’ in Barcelona, or ‘Berlin does not love you’ in the German capital, as described by the authors of The Overtourism Debate, Johannes Novy and Claire Colomb.
It’s now been reported that the couple is in discussions about offering the city a ‘gesture of appreciation’, according to The Sun, which could apparently comprise something literary-related (Dua Lipa runs a respected book club as part of her Service95 newsletter) or sports-related.
Sound familiar? Well, that might be because Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez made similar pledges after their wildly controversial wedding weekend in Venice in 2025, reportedly donating €3 million to the city, according to Vanity Fair.
The cash did little to quell local grievances, though. Ahead of the extravagant, three-day celebrations, the couple opted to change their venue from Scuola Grande della Misericordia to the Arsenale after activists associated with the No Space For Bezos movement vowed to make their wedding a ‘nightmare’. Threats included blocking the canal with inflatable crocodiles so the guests would fail to get in. Yes, really.
Who’s actually to blame for cities being offered up for ‘rent’?
While it can’t be denied that cities are suffering because of sheer visitor volume, the syphoning off of streets and public spaces is a whole different ballpark when it comes to how the lives of local people are affected.
A 2024 study by Claudio Milano, Marina Novelli and Antonio Paolo Russo details the several ways in which a high-profile wedding like Dua Lipa and Callum Turner’s could have – albeit temporarily – damaged the neighbourhood where the event was held.
Blocking off the public piazzas marks what the study describes as the ‘privatisation of public goods’, and by protesting against that, local people were simply exercising their ‘exclusionary agency’.
It’s a sentiment reflected in the comments section of this Complex post, where plenty of Instagram users sided with the protesters. ‘Well I don’t think just because you’re rich you’re entitled to close part of the city for your event and locals can’t go in the streets they live in..’ said jakethedripper_, while segumarket said ‘I totally agree, the cities are not private places that riches could rent.’
However, the study also details that some overtourism initiatives – instead of managing visitor numbers by implementing caps or entry fees – instead rebrand the destination as a whole to cater to a smaller pool of wealthier people. By allowing the ‘privatisation of public goods’, Palermo’s lived-in streets and squares became a playground for a lavish party.
One user, alankalu, said: ‘This is done all the time. Everywhere. For shooting movies, music videos, whatever’, while dreamsmendesx added ‘From a Sicilian, we are not like this!’
But some users encouraged the blame to be placed elsewhere: Ladymimiii wrote ‘Why y’all mad at her be mad at your government for letting it be for sale’, a sentiment echoed by mayaclmb, who said ‘Well this is obviously something the government allowed lol not dua’s fault’.
And they have a point. While celebrities like Dua Lipa and Callum Turner (and, particularly, Jeff Bezos) hold the purse strings, local governments also play a role in facilitating the use of public spaces in this way.
While celebrities hold the purse strings, local governments play a role in facilitating the use of public spaces
That same study further details a phenomenon called ‘displacement culture’, which sees changes to the local ‘social ecosystem’ when public spaces are transformed into what is dubbed ‘temporal dwellings’ – or pop-ups for celebrity use.
It clashes with the everyday purpose of those spaces – which in the case of Palermo, are used as gathering spaces by local residents – and marks what can only be described as a double standard when it comes to overtourism. Average travellers have to pay entry to attractions, pay tourist tax, and avoid certain ‘residents-only’ zones, while the scenic streets of a neighbourhood frequented by ordinary people can be completely closed off to them in the name of a celebrity wedding.
It might have been a different story if Bezos or Lipa had opted to hold their celebrations in a lesser-visited part of Italy, attracting attention to smaller towns and regions. Cities like Palermo and Venice are already under strain from high visitor numbers, and the practice of the super-rich ‘renting out’ these destinations of course only makes matters worse. If overtourism is going to be properly managed, it would be an oversight to continually penalise travellers without reigning in the rights afforded to individuals rich enough to buy out public spaces, or try to quell uproar by splashing cash.
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