After having another look… I’m thinking it’s the Widget class plugin. You might want to double check the settings on the plugin if you are. I would recommend you look at your page with the italics and then look at the source code using your browser and find that particular content in the widgets area to see all the tags in there. One is right after the
heading which then has another nested that looks like this:
ABOUT THE BOOKS
How those got in there I have no idea, but you have something in your site that is adding a ton of tags in and around widget titles which really is puzzling me because the widget title
tag is coded in the theme files but no where in any of my themes do I use .
Double check your widgets in the page (not the post right sidebar column), but also check that your Widget CSS classes plugin is also not loading extra styles in (set everything to No. Another option is to redo the widgets, delete those that have the italics and rebuild them.