Hello Tony,

Thanks, for your feedback, it put me in the right track.
I'll just leave my findings for anyone that searches the forum for a similar issue.

In fact i was not generating a page via a server side scripting language such as PHP, i was going directly to a xml file. The problem was that the BOM was missing

http://unicode.org/faq/utf_bom.html#BOM

As soon as i opened and saved the file with an UTF-8 compliant editor it started working.

Thanks for your help!

M