<p>Before anyone recommends that I do a google search on this, I have. I just need a bit more clarity around what codepages and encodings.</p>

<p>If I use UTF8 encoding, and use an italian code page and then a french code page, does this mean ill get different characters even though the bytes havent changed?</p>

Joel has a nice summary of this:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
And no. if I understand your question correctly it doesn't mean that.
When you're converting UTF-8 to a specific code page, it is possible that only some of the characters are going to be converted. What happens to the ones that don't get converted depends on how you call the conversion. A possible result is that the characters which could not be mapped to the code page would be converted to question mark characters.