No luck fixing the italic font on some sites problem. No problem reading the italic sites with workarounds or switching search engines, from the two that display it that less-readable way. The following code replicates the too-italic font in the speed dial and restores it to normal. So opera is probably not finding a font somewhere. I've way too many to figure out the fix; it will probably disappear someday. OTOH this disappearing-font problem may reappear also... at least it is all more passable now.
Code:
cd /usr/local/share
mv fonts fonts.bak
...
mv fonts.bak fonts
That path is new as of this week.