Text escaped when I want it to show up as html in Flask/jinja2

Instead of data=Markup(feedItem.html).unescape(), you should be using data=Markup(feedItem.html). That will do the right thing and keep your template clean.

Calling unescape() here is pointless (unless feeditem.html contains pre-escaped html, which it probably doesn't). More importantly, using unescape() here produces a string/unicode object instead of a Markup object, which keeps Jinja2 from recognizing that the field contains html that needs escaping. This defeats Jinja2's automatic escaping ability (that's the purpose of the Markup class!) I also forces your future template maintainers to remember that this field requires manual escaping, which clutters the template code with extra calls.

This should work too.

{% extends "layout.html" %}
{% block body %}
{{ data|safe }}
{% endblock %}