Overriding italics for a portion of a style

Some taxonomic names that are mostly italicized have a portion that ideally should not be italicized, terms that occur between the italicized words, eg, subsp., var., morph, form, sect., subg., etc). I cannot figure out how to achieve this with the taxonomic templates ({{taxon}}, {{taxlink}}, and {{taxoninfl}}) as they are now. I tried pipes with both wikiformatting and the HTML "i" tag. I wonder whether the formatting built in to the template (style "biota"?) overrides any such formatting. Is there a simple way to change this? The scores of thousands of uses of these template mostly appear correctly except for this detail, which affects fewer than two thousand template uses, I think. It is most meaningful probably for the inflection-line template, with perhaps 100-200 template uses with those preferably un-italicized terms.