Php Zend's Lucene highlighter and unicode

This one is driving me mad. I am trying to get search results out of Lucene, but it just won't behave. Here is what I am doing:

$userQuery = Zend_Search_Lucene_Search_QueryParser::parse($_GET['query'], 'utf-8');
$search->results = $this->index->find($userQuery);
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Then I retrieve hits and on each hit I am trying to highlight matches.

$html = $query->highlightMatches($hit->body, 'utf-8');
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I am searching for "attività": it will find a correct hit, but it won't highlight anything, and it will output the complete text, together with correct accents (so I see the "attività" word unhighlighted).

If I omit the 'utf-8' parameter in highlightMatches, it will highlight the attività word, but the "à" character is truncated from the output, so it will display "attivit". The output string in this case is ASCII encoded.

What is wrong??! My pages are utf-8 encoded. I add document with the following logic:

// Following two lines are at the initialization so they hold for all code
Zend_Search_Lucene_Search_QueryParser::setDefaultEncoding('UTF-8');
Zend_Search_Lucene_Analysis_Analyzer::setDefault(
  new Zend_Search_Lucene_Analysis_Analyzer_Common_Utf8_CaseInsensitive ()
);
...
$doc->addField(Zend_Search_Lucene_Field::Text($fieldName, $fieldValue, "UTF-8"));
...
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Any help greatly appreciated!!