two questions on emacs under Mutt

[Vittorio <vdemart@supereva.it>]

I've installed Mutt and am using as my pet e-mail composer emacs. 

1) I'm experiencing  problems with the accented characters so frequent in Italian.
When I save an e-mail  to be sent (C-x C-s) emacs invariably says that there are the accented characters and compells me to give a charset. Selecting iso-8859-1 it goes all ok.

Where can I configure character set that emacs should use?

2) Is that possible to configure emacs to wrap lines at, say, 72 char?

Thanks for your help
Ciao
Vittorio