You have two issues going on.
One: italics that render EVERYWHERE in opera. I just solved this issue myself. It is because you flashed or applied a font theme, but original arial-italic and arial-bolditalic remain. Go to system/fonts and (backup) and delete those two, but not arial and arial bold. I did so (I use original-fonts.zip found somewhere, either here or xda, that gives me the original android font) and I can confirm that in opera mobile, the correct regular font renders now unless it *should* be italic or bolditalic. Notice how it's not only italic, but actually arial italic?
I can also confirm this has done nothing to harm the rendering of italics and bold italics in other apps. Again, your mileage may vary, as you don't look to be using the same font replacement as I do, so back the fonts up before you delete, but I doubt you'll have any issues.
two: google sites default (this is a google thing) to giving you the old school blackberryesque wap site for opera mobile. You can force google to ignore the fact that it thinks opera is incapable of showing its iphone/android versions by going to the URLs in the following link:
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/11/urls-for-iphone-optimized-google-sites.html
It's a pain, because after you do a search with the opera search field or the search button it will always give you the results in the google WAP version, but you can still bookmark sites like google news, etc using these URLs.