Florence has bid arrivederci and goodbye to Kanye and Kim. Come back soon, but please, not too soon.
They held their wedding on a grassy ridge at the top of the Forti di Belvedere. The couple didn’t want to do it at an accessible part of the fort, so they hired a crane to lift every single item used in the wedding up 230 feet (70 meters) to the very top.
The biggest decorative element of the wedding was a giant gold box, 49 feet (15 meters) tall, which contained the bathrooms. It was situated right next to the dinner tables at the reception with a bar in front of it. According to one Italian, “Their toilet was the star of the show.” The Italians named it the Torre di Bagni Oro (translation: the Gold Toilet Tower).
The dinner table was a long marble table. Instead of place cards, they had a team of Italian stonemasons engrave the name of each guest into the marble of the tabletop in front of the individual place settings. The job was finished the night before. Unfortunately, the wedding planners had spelled some people’s names wrong. And then, so many people brought entourages, the seating was a disaster. The only people who sat at their own seats were Kim and Kanye.
Four days before the wedding, they ordered 30 life-size nudes to be made from black marble from Carrara. The marble workers worked through the night to cut enough blocks, but 10 of them fell apart, another 10 were too damaged in transit to put out, and of the remaining 10, four were missing their heads. They were put out around the dinner tables.
Kanye came to the venue two hours before the wedding during set-up and ordered the marble nudes moved out farther away from the dinner tables. Each weighed half a ton, so the whole crew spent the final two hours rushing to get them moved. The forklifts were the first thing the guests saw upon arrival. And the gleaming Gold Toilet Tower.
Also two hours before the wedding, Kanye decided he didn’t need the 80 moving lights that he had ordered installed to light the dance floor and the party, declaring, “I’m in the center of this party, and I’m the only one people need to see. The rest of these people don’t need lights on them.” The lights, which had taken four days to install, were all removed, and the crane took them down the hill.
Kanye returned one hour before the wedding and didn’t like the all-white bar that was in front of the Gold Toilet Tower. He took a saw and started sawing it in half himself. Two men held the bar stable as he sawed, and sawed, into the bar, defacing the entire front, screaming at everyone around him. He said it looked like a bar from Texas. Then he ordered two pieces of raw wood to be nailed onto the front of the bar. Once the wood was in place, “Now,” he said, “it’s art.” The Italian construction teams looked at this guy and couldn’t believe what they were seeing.
At that same visit, when Kanye saw the $136,000 (100,000 Euro) audio system, described by one producer as the single best system in Europe, he said he didn’t like the look of the speakers and wanted them to be invisible. He said that “You Italians don’t understand my Minimalist style.” So he had the entire system pulled out as the guests were arriving, and his wedding music came from an iPod until after dinner.
There was the custom-built marble piano that John Legend used to play the song “Ordinary People.” Yes, you read that correctly: a marble piano.
Kanye danced five songs alone with Kim to John Legend (playing the marble piano), with no one else on the dance floor, and light only on them. It felt like it went on forever. Kanye then gave a 45-minute toast to himself.
As for the guests: Will Smith‘s son Jaden wore a white Batman costume and ran around like a chicken with its head cut off from 8:30 p.m. until 10:25 p.m., batting glasses off tables whenever he came to an empty seat, smashing them on the ground. Vogue Italia’s editor in chief, Franca Sozzani, was getting irritated because he kept coming up behind her and throwing his cape over her head.
People arrived at the ceremony several drinks in: Several rounds of cocktails had been served to the guests who waited for Kim, who was 25 minutes late to the wedding. In the time between ceremony and dinner, one woman in her 50s was so drunk that she collapsed. An ambulance arrived and just as the medics got to the guest, a Justin Bieber fan, hoping to catch a sight of him, who had climbed up to the top of the Belvedere tower, fell. As the Bieber fan was seriously hurt, they triaged the drunk guest, left her lying on an ottoman and went off to take care of the fallen fan. The drunk woman spent the rest of the night passed out on the ottoman, while the Bieber fan was taken to the hospital. Bieber never showed up.
Earlier, Kim had come out to check the venue. A lone spotlight was shining on the terrace as she walked out. She stopped with the beam focused on her crotch. She was furious that a beam of light had hit her crotch (even though she was the one who walked into the beam) and started screaming, ran over to the electrical boards and unplugged the entire circuit. This shut down half the lights on the cocktail area. It also turned out the lights in the bathrooms, so the Gold Toilet Tower was dark inside, and everyone was too afraid to plug the lights back in.
Andrea Bocelli sang during Kim’s processional. The blind opera legend had been asked as a guest, but the wedding planners hadn’t provided a seat for him. He said he’d be happy with a glass of water, and was told after his performance, “Thank you, but it’s time for you to get in your car and go home.” Bye-bye to one of the greatest living Italian vocalists of all time.
And the most prominent wedding gift was a giant bottle of Chianti, which had been dipped in gold (probably great for the flavor of the wine), the cork replaced with a diamond, a gift from Jay Z (a no-show).
