Learning Italian from Mozart: “Così fan tutte” translated “all women are like that”

Recently we spoke about Geri Halliwell’s and Fabrizio Politi’s split, and I mentioned the phrase “Così fan tutte“.
The words are the title of Mozart’s famous opera set in Venice, which takes up the theme of “fiancée swapping”.
In a complicated plot, the love of two sister’s for their respective fiancees is the subject of a wager on the infedelity of women.

The fiancees, disguised, woo the opposite sister of their original love interest in a test.
The women are ultimate found to be fickle and unfaithful and so the title of the opera, “Così fan tutte” is to be translated as “all women are like that”, with “tutte”, ending in ‘e’, being the plural female subject.
In the video above, Cecilia Bartoli sings in the famous seduction duet “Fra Gli amplessi in pochi Stanti” or “In the embraces (in an instant)”.

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