[Leonatus]

Maybe this kind of newbie-thread (in so far as css is concerned) is the right one for my problem:
I have a text with notes (adjoint to the relative chapters). I added a ".notes"-paragraph style to make the notes look a bit different from the "normal" text (it is from Project Gutenberg). O.k., this worked. There are some notes with citations from other books, esp. poems, and I wanted to emphasize them a bit within the notes. So I added a ".cite" class with larger margin-left and smaller margin-top and margin-bottom.

p {
    display: block;
    font-size: 1em;
    line-height: normal;
    margin-bottom: 0.3em;
    margin-top: 0.3em;
    text-indent: 1em;
    text-align: justify
    }
.noindent {
    display: block;
    font-size: 1em;
    line-height: normal;
    margin-bottom: 0.3em;
    margin-top: 0.3em;
    text-indent: 0;
    text-align: justify
}
.notes {
    display: block;
    font-size: 1em;
    font-style: italic;
    line-height: normal;
    margin-bottom: 0.3em;
    margin-top: 0.3em;
    margin-left: 2em;
    text-indent: 0;
    text-align: justify
}
.cite {
    display: block;
    font-size: 1em;
    font-style: italic;
    line-height: normal;
    margin-bottom: 0.1em;
    margin-top: 0.1em;
    margin-left: 4em;
    text-indent: 0;
    text-align: left
}

When I applied this to the text (each single line of a poem), the surprise was that
- the text was not italic,
- left margin took no effect,
- instead of smaller margins, they became larger (top and bottom), not only in relation to the preceeding ".notes"-class, but also in relation to a preceeding ".cite"-class.

Any trial to change the settings of the ".cite"-class had no effect at all.

Okay, I could apply the normal ".notes"-class and work with <br />, but I would really like to know what was going wrong. Anybody who could explain it to me? I s this perhaps a Sigil problem?