Well, as some of you told before, wiki software converts bold and italic
markup into <b> and <i> tags; my suggestion is to use them as largely as
possible if they don't overload the server, and if particular use of
apostrophes into a particular language (as Italian) raises any trouble.
If they are "deprecated" or "discouraged", they could be converted in
CSS by
the software, if really needed.
--
Alex