Italy will put forward the art of Neapolitan pizza-making for inclusion in Unesco’s prestigious cultural heritage list this year, after the country’s Unesco commission unanimously confirmed its candidacy, which was proposed by the government.

The proposal was boosted by a petition that collected more than 850,000 signatures, from the streets of Naples all the way to Japan and Argentina.

The selection commission said the art of pizza-making was a central element of Neapolitan and Italian identity, and a symbol of the brand of Italy around the world. Italy wants the Neapolitan pizza to be distinguished from rivals such as New York-style pizza.

Customers eating pizza in Manhattan, New York. Photograph: Mark Peterson/Corbis

According to Coldiretti, the Italian association of agricultural entrepreneurs, the pizza industry is worth €10bn (£8bn) and employs 100,000 people.

A dossier making the case for Neapolitan pizza will now be submitted to Unesco. After a year-long process that will involve 200 countries, a decision on what to include in the list will be taken in Paris in 2017.

According to the rules set out by the Association of the Real Neapolitan Pizza, a genuine Neapolitan pizza dough consists of wheat flour (type 0 or 00, or a mixture of the two), compressed biologically produced yeast, sea salt and water. The dough must be kneaded by hand or with a low-speed mixer. After the rising process, the dough should be formed without the help of a rolling pin or other machine, and it may be no more than 3mm thick.

Real Neapolitan pizza is limited to two types: marinara (tomato, oil, oregano and garlic) and margherita (tomato, oil, mozzarella or fior di latte, grated cheese and basil).

Unesco’s list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity offers UN protection to cultural practices and traditions that “help demonstrate the diversity of [cultural] heritage and raise awareness about its importance”.

If pizza makes the cut, it will join cultural practices such as the ancient Georgian traditional Qvevri wine-making method, the Mongolian coaxing ritual for camels, Slovakian bagpipe culture, Romanian lad’s dancing and Turkmenistan’s epic art of Gorogly.

Other Italian traditions already on the Unesco list are opera dei pupi (Sicilian puppet theatre), canto a tenore (Sardinian pastoral songs), the agricultural practice in the community on Pantelleria of cultivating head-trained bush vines, celebrations of big shoulder-borne processional structures, and the Mediterranean diet, the latter honour shared with Cyprus, Croatia, Spain, Greece, Morocco and Portugal.