escape special chars

Hi, there!

Could anybody suggest me how to escape special characters like è, ò, & etc. When switched forth and back between the source and html form, the editor visualizes that  &, è,  ò etc are escaped,  but I save the file then I see that symbols à, ò etc. are not escaped. I'd like in fact to have them escaped as well (but not html tag, so that <h1> remains <h1> and not &lt;h1&gt;).

Thanks in advance,

Mario

P.S: there are a lot of questions on the topic, but no answers I have found.