Dear DocBook Gurus (or at least, more experienced users than me!)

I want to refer to taxonomic names -- genus, species, etc. -- in my DocBook documents. By convention, these are _always_ set in italics, and if mine are not, then I will just look ignorant. What should I use?

The closest thing I could find to a "correct" answer was something like

<phrase role="genus">Sauroposeidon</phrase> <phrase role="species">proteles</phrase>

but that doesn't get any typographical treatment, so it's useless to me. (The default HTML conversion of this just gives me <SPAN class="phrase">, discarding the genus/species information, so I can't use CSS to get the typography I need.)

Then I wondered about <foreignphrase>, but first that's not really quite accurate, and second, the Processing Expectations section in the book just says "ForeignPrases are _often_ given special typographical treatment, such as italics" (emphasis added) which isn't good enough.

I can't even cheat by falling back to an <italic> markup -- there's no such thing, and I fully understand the reasons why -- and <emphasize> hedges over its typographical representation for presumably the same reasons.

What's a poor boy to do?