International characters

I’m using WP 1.5, but i got same problem with the 1.2. My blog is in italian and we use a lot accented characters (?¨?2?? etc) if i post an article typing i.e ?¨ directly it show ok on my server but if i copy the database locally it show weird characters. If i code them correctly as i.e è i avoid the problem and beside i get a perfect html coded page.

How come tha the standard insert/edit page for WP doens’t parse the inserted text to encode special chars? There ia plan to add this feature to 1.5 or the is a plugin to do this ? Thanks