Marriages between Italians and foreigners have increased tenfold in fifteen years, according to the latest survey.
Mixed marriages are up from 60,000 in 1991 to 600,000 last year, Catholic charity organisation Caritas/Migrantes said, citing data from statistics agency Istat.
The pace is rising as more immigrants enter the country, with a surge of 22% in the last two years, Istat said.
Caritas highlighted the apparent preferences of Italians by gender.
Italian men appeared to prefer Filipino, Romanian, Peruvian and Albanian women, Caritas said - perhaps reflecting an increase in the number of wealthy Italians who either have mail-order brides or end up marrying their foreign carers.
More than three quarters of the Filipinas in Italy have married Italians, compared to 67% of Romanian immigrants who've tied the knot with Italians.
The proportion of the Peruvian and Albanian female population with Italian husbands hovers around the 60% mark.
Italian women, by contrast, appear to favour North Africans.
The Senegalese who have taken over from Italians in stoking northern smoke stacks: 75% of them have Italian wives.
Tunisians come second with 72%, followed by Moroccans with 53%.
As it has done elsewhere, the Chinese community is marked out by its insularity, at least in this respect: more than 84% marry other Chinese.
Geographically, affluent northern Italy leads the way in mixed marriages while the poorer south lags behind.
In other points, the report highlighted that the number of children of mixed marriages has risen 22% in the last six years.
Ten per cent of marriages are now between Muslims and Catholics.
The biggest problems in mixed marriages have to do with children, especially where Muslim or North African men are concerned.
By custom and religion these men have a high perception of their domestic entitlements - a fact that can lead to growing tension, Caritas and Istat said.
The Muslim tradition of female subservience often leads to marital break-down, even though most Italian women convert to Islam, the report said.
"In North Africa, children are considered the 'property' of the husband," said one of the experts cited in the report, Maria Tognetti of Milan's Bicocca University.
"Some of these fathers will end up kidnapping their children to bring them back to patriarchal domains," she pointed out.
Given the tension sparked by these crucial cultural mismatches, mixed marriages can be short, the report said.
The current average duration is just five years in Milan, compared to 13 years in the southern melting-pot port of Lecce, the report highlighted.
However, Tognetti highlighted that mixed marriages can be "a precious cultural laboratory, also for those who are on the outside looking in, such as relatives and friends".
Catholic religious instruction in Italian schools - no longer compulsory, but without alternatives - was cited by some couples as a problem.
"Our kid was left out in a cold corridor for one hour every week," Pakistani immigrant Ejaz Ahmed and his Italian wife Valentina Benedetti told Monday's edition of La Repubblica daily.
"In the end we said he could join the class - also to make sure he wasn't cold-shouldered by his schoolmates".
Problems can also arise when Italians step into their spouse's home culture, the couple told La Repubblica
"When we visited Ejaz's home in Lahore I was expected to sit in a room full of silent women, dumbly accepting bulging dowry envelopes," Benedetti said.
"I lasted for three hours then dashed outside for a cigarette, only to be chased back in by Ahmed's male relatives".
Ejaz, for his part, recounted that his wife's visit "finally" broke through the "icy atmosphere" his marriage had created.
"They expected me to marry a Pakistani, of course, and someone of a similarly high caste," said the legally trained Ejaz who had a variety of jobs before setting up a "cultural mediation" agency with his wife.
"Then, of course, my wife shot up in my mother's estimation after she had two male children".
As for Benedetti's Italian relatives, "they took to him straight off and my mum soon fattened him up," she said.
The couple have kept to their own Islamic and Catholic beliefs but their children are being brought up in the Muslim tradition, like the vast majority of their counterparts.
Benedetti said initial tensions had eased and "being a mixed couple is now a fact of life."
"But I'm worried that the winds of fundamentalism will bring hard times for our children".
"I'm afraid the war between Islam and the West may come through the doors of our house, which up till now has been a real oasis of peace".
The report came out the day after Pope Benedict XVI marked the 93rd World Day of Migrants and Refugee by urging Italy to "accept" more immigrants, saying they were a much-needed resource.
