Ulteriore informazione:
Se faccio invece SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'character_set%' mi spunta:

character_set_client:latin1
character_set_connection:latin1
character_set_database:latin1
character_set_filesystem:binary
character_set_results:latin1
character_set_server:latin1
character_set_system:utf8
character_sets_dir:C:\Programmi\Zend\MySQL51\share \charsets\

Spero qualcuno possa aiutarmi.

Grazie
Ethan78