The association said 100,000 people are in permanent roles across Italy’s pizza sector, while an extra 50,000 are weekend workers.
Of the total, 65,000 are Italian, while 20,000 are Egyptian and over 10,000 are from Morocco.
Coldiretti said the foreign pizza makers were an “important contribution” towards keeping the tradition of pizza-making alive in Italy, but that it is also a sector that “needs to be protected”.
In that respect, the association has asked Italy’s Unesco’s commission to include the art of the traditional Neopolitan pizza maker in the UN cultural organization’s Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage.
The commission was set to meet on Thursday.
“The recognition will protect a business that in Italy alone generates €10 billion a year,” Coldiretti said in a statement.
There are 63,000 pizzerias and pizza take-aways in Italy, which between them bake 5,000 pizzas a day.
An average 7.6kg of pizza per person is eaten each year in Italy, second only to the US, where 13kg of pizza per person is consumed a year.