PHP Date format in EUR (Italian)

Hi
I'm a newby and getting a lot confused in formatting the date in dd/mm/yyyy,
I' ve checked the forum and on internet but I could'nt format the date in the recordset as:

DATE_FORMAT(date_in, %d %m,%Y)AS date_in

with the recordset qwery created by DataAsist it doesn't work so I'm tryng to format it by PHP on the page with no luck...
What can I do? here is the row to be chanched on the php page:

<tr>
<th class="WADADataTableHeader">data_in:</th>
<td class="WADADataTableCell"><?php echo($row_WADAapparato['data_in']); ?>
</td>

While this is the DataAssist Recordset:

SELECT id_apparato, tipologia_id, marca_id, modello_id, serial_num, ubicazione_id, data_in, note
FROM apparato
WHERE id_apparato = Paramid_apparato OR ( -1= Paramid_apparato2 AND id_apparato= ParamSessionid_apparato)

Can someone please help me?

Franco