Problem with euro symbol with Tomcat and MySql

Good day.

I have a big problem regarding the euro symbol between Tomcat and MySql.
I made a jsp page having a form that contains a textarea.
In it I digit the euro symbol.
The action of a form call a Tomcat's servlet that read a value of the field and write it in a MySql's table via jdbc.
The problem is that in the database the euro symbol is written as ? (question mark).

The environment is a Linux in english with Tomcat 6.0.10 and MySql 5.0.18.
The jdbc driver (5.0.4 but I've tried also the 5.1.18) is setted in a context.xml (Tomcat configuration file) because is in a pool connection and I haven't setted the charset encoding.
The database, the table that I use and any its fields having latin1_swedish_ci as collation.

I have tried to set latin1 as charsetEncoding parameter of the jdbc connection:

I have also setted utf8 as charsetEncoding using as collation of database, table and fields utf8_general_ci
At the end I've tried to set as collation utf8_unicode_ci for database, table and fields with jdbc parameters useUnicode="true" and characterEncoding="UTF-8".

In all these tests the result is allways the same: ? (question mark) write in a table's field.
If I digit it directly in a table via PhpMyAdmin (using all types of collation tested) I haven't problem.

Noted that in the sql query composed in a servlet the euro symbol is correct (I've seen it with System.out.println()).

How can I resolve my problem?

Best regards and good work.

Stefano Errani