Markup?

I'm using Vanilla 1, and I'd like to be able to use italics, bold and maybe bullet lists. Casual experimentation shows that none of the markup languages I'm familiar with work out of the box. I'm not really picky... could someone point me to instructions or a plugin that would enable me to bold text?

I tried searching, but the majority of discussion I found seemed to apply to Vanilla 1.x, URLs that have changed, or otherwise not meet my needs.

I apologize that this question probably sounds impossibly dumb. Thanks for your help.