Bug report: Italian, accented letters and different encodings

[d1nuc0m]

Disclaimer: this has already been reported through email, this is not a support request but a bug report.

Bug
When trying to read in Italian language a file containing accented characters, Festival isn't able to open if it is in UTF-8.
As soon as the file is re-coded as lat1 (ISO-8859-15), everything works as expected.

Steps to reproduce

• Install Festival with Italian voices (see below for details, it's been tested on multiple platforms)
• festival --tts Ciao_UTF8.txt returns the following error

LTS_Ruleset italian_downcase: no rule matches: 
LTS_Ruleset: # *here* � � # 

• festival --tts Ciao_lat1_ISO_8859-15.txt just works

Platforms

1. MX Linux, Festival 2.5.0, with packages festival, festival-doc, festival-freebsoft-utils, festlex-cmu, festlex-ifd, festvox-italp16k, festvox-italpc16k, speech-dispatcher-festival
2. Artix Linux, Festival 2.5.0, with packages festival-us, festival-freebsoft-utils (AUR), festival-italian (AUR), sox Applied patch as of issue Error with Italian voices #31 , using attached ~/.festivalrc

Temporary workarounds
Re-encoding files to lat1 (ISO-8859-15) with recode, but it is a problem when trying to use festival with other software like Calibre or speechd, that still recommends festival as synthetizer.
Avoid using accented letters in Italian is practically impossible and can't be suggested as a solution.