No docutils, pandoc, or any other tricks! Just a README.md and a setup.py.

See the source for this project here: https://github.com/di/markdown-description-example.

Instructions to do this for your project are here: https://dustingram.com/articles/2018/03/16/markdown-descriptions-on-pypi

What we can do:

We can do italics and bold text.

• Lists
• Are
• Fun
• Too
  • (But please use responsibly)

Code blocks:

>>> pypi_supports_markdown
True

And much much more!