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A2+

Le donne lo sanno

Ligabue

Language
Italian
Released
2005
Genre
rock
Level
A2+
Difficulty score
621
Duration
4:26

How to study this song

“Le donne lo sanno” carries 14 Italian words, 5 adjectives and 23 verb forms — 42 study entries in all, graded A2+. Start with the glossary: donne, cuore and testa come up again and again, so they are the ones to know first. This one leans on its verbs: 23 distinct forms against 5 adjectives, so conjugation is where the effort goes. At this level the goal is recognition: hear a word, place it, keep going.

The words of this song, in several languages

Every word below is taken from this song and translated by us. Nothing here is the lyric itself — these are the individual words you need in order to follow it.

Vocabulary

ITENESFRPTNLDE
donnewomenmujeresfemmesmulheresvrouwenFrauen
cuoreheartcorazóncœurcoraçãohartHerz
testaheadcabezatêtecabeçahoofdKopf

This card holds 11 more words. You meet them when you play the song.

Adjectives

What this song teaches you

Level · A2+

Vocabulary words
14
Adjectives
5
Word combos
6
Expressions
10
Verb forms
23
Quiz questions
35

More Italian songs at this level

  • Flamenco paranoia — Samurai Jay, Vito Salamanca (2026)A2
  • Ancora — Eduardo De Crescenzo (1981)A2
  • Laura non c'è — Nek (1997)A2+
  • Piove in discoteca — Tommaso Paradiso (2022)A2-

Background

About the song

«Le donne lo sanno» is one of the best known songs by Luciano Ligabue, the singer, writer and film director who has been the central figure of Italian rock since the early nineties. It was written by Ligabue himself and released as the third single from his eighth studio album, «Nome e cognome», in February 2006. The album had come out on 16 September 2005 on Warner Music Italy, and by the time this song reached the radio it had already produced two hits, «Il giorno dei giorni» and «L’amore conta». The record had been made between February and April 2005 at the Zoo Studio in Correggio, the small town in Emilia where Ligabue was born and where he still lives and works.

The subject of the song is stated plainly in its title, and the Italian encyclopaedia describes it as an explicit acknowledgement of the superiority of women over men: in stubbornness, in the ability to do many different things at once, and in the gentleness with which they think and act. The singer does not speak for women; he speaks as a man watching them and admitting, verse after verse, that they understood something first and that he did not. The refrain keeps returning to the same idea without ever naming what it is that women know, and that silence is the whole trick of the lyric: whatever it is, they have known it since always, and they know it before anybody else.

Around that idea the song builds a short portrait of very different women. There are the ones who can explain love, or at least try to pull an explanation out of you; there are the ones who are absent, and who know how to be absent in a way that hurts more; there are the ones who understand where a person comes from just by looking. In the bridge the perspective widens into something almost dark: women are described as familiar with the far edge of pleasure and the far edge of horror, and as knowing places and voices that the man listening will never reach. It is a compliment, but it is not a comfortable one.

Musically the track is straight alternative rock of four and a half minutes, built on the band Ligabue was touring with at the time: Federico Poggipollini and Niccolò Bossini on guitars, Antonio Righetti on bass, Fabrizio Simoncioni on keyboards and backing vocals, and Alessandro Lugli on drums. The production is credited to Fabrizio Barbacci, Luca Pernici and Ligabue. The arrangement grows in the repeated section, where the same lines are sung first with the verb for being able to and then with the verb for wanting to, so that a statement about what women can do turns into a statement about what women want. That single substitution is the emotional hinge of the song, and it is also the reason the track works so well live.

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ITENESFRPTNLDE
primefirstprimeraspremièresprimeiraseersteerste

This card holds 4 more adjectives. You meet them when you play the song.

Verb forms

ITENESFRPTNLDE
sannothey knowsabenelles saventsabemzij wetensie wissen
saiyou knowsabestu saissabesjij weetdu weißt
l’han sempre saputothey have always known itsiempre lo han sabidoelles l’ont toujours susempre o souberamze hebben het altijd gewetensie haben es immer gewusst
conosconothey knowconocenelles connaissentconhecemzij kennensie kennen
èises, estáestéisist
siait isseace soitsejahet ises ist
sonthey aresonelles sontsãoze zijnsie sind
possonothey canpuedenelles peuventpodemzij kunnensie können

This card holds 15 more verb forms. You meet them when you play the song.

For a learner of Italian the song is an unusually rich piece of material, because almost everything in it is built on the verb «sapere», to know. It appears in the third person plural of the present, in the second person singular, in a compound past with the auxiliary shortened, and in the infinitive form of the related verb «conoscere», which is the other Italian verb for knowing. Alongside that there is a small catalogue of features that textbooks usually introduce much later: truncated infinitives, where the final vowel of a verb simply falls away in singing; infinitives carrying two pronouns glued to the end at once; an impersonal construction with «si»; the expression built on «ci vuole», meaning that something is needed; a past progressive with «stare» plus the gerund; and the correlative pattern that strings several indirect questions together. None of this is decorative: it is the ordinary spoken Italian that a listener meets on the radio and almost never in a first course.

The song has had a long second life. It is a fixture of Ligabue’s concerts, from San Siro in 2006 to the enormous Campovolo shows, and over the years it has become one of the pieces Italian radio reaches for every 8 March, International Women’s Day. In March 2026 Sky built an event around it, inviting Ligabue to talk about the song on that date. Twenty years after it was recorded, a rock single from an Emilian songwriter has ended up as a kind of annual public ritual.

Did you know?

The video was directed by Silvio Muccino, the actor and film-maker, and not by a music video specialist. It was shot on 3 March 2006 at the airport of Casale Monferrato, in the province of Alessandria, and was released on 20 March 2006. The woman who appears in it is Chiara Tortorella, daughter of the television presenter Cino Tortorella, known to generations of Italian children as the magician Mago Zurlì.

Ligabue was born on 13 March 1960 in Correggio, in the province of Reggio Emilia, and came to music late. Before his first record he worked in the fields and in factories, and it was only in 1987 that he put together an amateur band called Orazero. The fellow Emilian songwriter Pierangelo Bertoli noticed his writing and recorded one of his songs in 1988, which led to a contract and to a debut album in May 1990.

He is also a film director. His first feature, «Radiofreccia» in 1998, was a semi-autobiographical story about a small local radio station and won three David di Donatello awards, the main Italian cinema prize. He has published short stories and poetry as well.

The year before this single, in 2005, Ligabue played a concert at Campovolo in Reggio Emilia in front of roughly 180,000 people, which stood as a European attendance record for a paying show by a single artist. «Le donne lo sanno» arrived a few months after that, with the whole country watching him.

On the album the song is one of eleven tracks that together run about forty-five minutes, and it is the third of six singles pulled from the record across 2005 and 2006, between «L’amore conta» and «Happy Hour». Few Italian albums of that decade were worked so hard by their label.

For a student of Italian the title itself is a grammar lesson. The pronoun that stands for what women know has no antecedent anywhere in the song: it points at something the listener is left to supply. Italian uses that little object pronoun constantly in this way, and learners who translate it word by word usually end up with a sentence that makes no sense in their own language.

The song is now firmly attached to 8 March, International Women’s Day, in Italy. In March 2026 the broadcaster Sky organised a public conversation with Ligabue built around it for that date, which is an unusual afterlife for a rock single released two decades earlier.

Charts & streaming

As a single, «Le donne lo sanno» reached number thirteen on the Italian singles chart and finished the year at number thirty-eight on the Italian annual ranking for 2006. Those numbers understate its real presence, because its success was above all a radio success: it went to number one on the Italian airplay chart, which is where the song lived for most of that spring. It was later certified gold in Italy, a level that corresponds to sales of more than twenty-five thousand units.

The album it came from did far bigger numbers. «Nome e cognome» went to number one in Italy, reached number twenty in Switzerland and number thirty-four on the European chart, and was certified diamond in Italy, the highest domestic certification. It was reissued as a remastered CD in December 2008 and again on limited red and black vinyl in January 2010, which is unusual for a record only five years old at the time.

The commercial pattern is worth noting for anyone looking at Italian charts of that period. Physical single sales in Italy had collapsed by 2006 and downloads were only beginning, so a track could dominate the radio for months and still peak outside the top ten on the sales chart. «Le donne lo sanno» is a textbook case: modest on paper, inescapable in practice, and still one of the two or three Ligabue songs that a general Italian audience can name twenty years later.