markup question on italics in blockquotes

Hi,
I was doing some editing on this text about the KAPD and managed to fix the issue (all the blockquotes were broken by line breaks and other stray html copied from elsewhere)... I was wondering if there is a way to "un-italicize" certain words inside a blockquote, because using inverted tags - e.g.: <*/*i*> Aufhebung <*i*> - also seems to break the blockquote. The blockquote itself is fully italicized but some words need emphasis.

Text is here: http://libcom.org/library/on-founding-kapd-germany-cwo

thanks.