How to enter accented vowels in KDE

I am going to use a PC with US keyboard and KDE (Kubuntu). While the US keyboard is perfect for programming, it isn't to enter Italian words with accented vowels (both lower and upper case).

I'd like to know if there's a way to enter the accented vowels (àèéìòù and the likes). Both using the "charmap" tool and switching the keyboard layout is not an option as it would be needed very often.

I have already read the answers to another similar question (involving GNOME) but it seems it's not working.

For example, if I press Alt-Gr+Shift+"A", and then "``" (only one inverted quote, this editor gets weird when it sees a single invrted quote!) I get "Æ`" with either left or right shift instead of "à".

Any hint?

For the case you use the basic English (US) keyboard layout, there are no dead keys, and hence the <dead_grave> <a> method does not apply.

Instead you need to define a key as the compose key, which lets you use the next method - <Multi_key> <grave> <a> - to type à:

Compose followed by ` followed by A

On KDE you define a compose key via Settings/Hardware/Keyboard/Advanced, Position Compose key (credit to Larry H. Poort)