Displaying special characters

Hello,

Through an HTML page, I input various fields. On my HTML page, I have the meta:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

On this page, I choose the month in the style of 01, 02, 03......:

Month: <SELECT name="mois_manif">
 <OPTION VALUE=""></OPTION>
 <OPTION VALUE="01">01</OPTION>
 <OPTION VALUE="02">02</OPTION>
 <OPTION VALUE="03">03</OPTION>................

From there, I have a PHP script to insert into my database (for different countries):

$months = array("january", "february", "march", "april", ................);
$months_it = array("gennaio", "febbraio", "marzo", "aprile", ................);
$months_sp = array("enero", "febrero", "marzo", "abril",.................);
$months_gb = array("January", "February", "March", "April"...............

And the result in the database is that special characters are replaced by "?". Therefore, the display on the internet is not good!
The database is declared as "utf8_general_ci". The date field where the month is stored is also declared as "utf8_general_ci". I tried "latin1_general_ci", and it's the same!!

What should I do?
Thank you