Is there is a way to italicise across lines like

/italicised
text/

rather than

/italicised/
/text/

For long pieces of text, italicising the ends of each line is
inefficient (maybe there could be a #+BEGIN_ITALICS, #+END_ITALICS, I know of
#+BEGIN_VERSE, just without the indentation without affecting verses.)

Best wishes,

Enda