I was able to reproduce this using an italian locale on Windows:
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_TIME, 'Italian_Italy.1252')
'Italian_Italy.1252'
>>> time.strftime("%A", time.strptime("2009-05-01", "%Y-%m-%d"))
'venerd?'

That should be 'venerdì'.
I also found http://bugs.python.org/issue3061 and
http://bugs.python.org/issue836035 that seem to be related. (#5398
instead doesn't seem to be related.)

Apparently on Py3.x a unicode string ('str') is returned, whereas Py2.x
returns an encoded string:
>>> time.strftime("%A", time.strptime("2009-05-01", "%Y-%m-%d"))
'venerd\xec'