Italic asterisks should be done by escaping the asterisk and wrapping it with html i-tag. It seems to be the only safe technique (3 asterisks to display 1 italic asterisk in a list works, unless followed by more markup for italic text; 1 escaped asterisk wrapped by i-tag works regardless of the rest of the line).
Asterisks need to be escaped with backslashes, but if surrounded by square brackets, the brackets need to be escaped as well. Does not apply to parentheses it seems, but maybe other characters with special markdown meaning.