The aria works for me on several levels:
It's Mozart -- who doesn't like Mozart?
The Italian libretto uses the 2nd person plural: voi che sapete...(ye who know). This looks like the second person singular (formal) in French: vous qui savez (you, sir, who know): French uses its second person plural vous form to address single people formally, while Italian reserves that pronoun -- voi = vous-- for addressing more than one person (second person plural). Italians use their third person (pronouns Lei and Lui) and corresponding verbs to address someone formally.
It seems that every European language -- whether derived from Latin or not -- chose a particular way to address strangers but especially royalty. The Germans took over their third person plural for this purpose: Wissen Sie (literally "They who know" is used to address one person; Greeks, like the French, use their second person plural; We, like the Italians use our third person singular verb form which you can see in vestigial English: "Does his majesty wish" (third person, singular). Anything but the familiar tu, du, thou's to address royals. If you think this is confusing, try holding all these in your head when playing polyglot.
The word nozze in Italian is intriguing. Where does it come from? The closest English cognate is nuptials.
Back to the aria itself. I should see "The Marriage of Figaro" before I die. I am a perfect candidate for enjoying opera, especially Italian. I have a good working knowledge of the language. Back when when I first studied it as my first foreign language at UW Madison, it was just me and a bunch of female music students in that class. Good times! I was just a local bumpkin -- not even matriculated -- trying to show off for those young women. That worked out well. But I always thought opera too highbrow for the likes of me. My sad loss.
