Italian Basketball Comes of Age

On Wednesday night, two of the N.B.A.’s three Italian players will be on the floor of Madison Square Garden when the Knicks play host to the Toronto Raptors on Italian Heritage Night. Danilo Gallinari is in his third season with the Knicks and Andrea Bargnani is in his fifth season with the Raptors. The third, Marco Belinelli, plays for the New Orleans Hornets.

Ten years ago, few could have envisioned that Italy would have three players in the N.B.A. Even in 2006, Gallinari played in the second Italian league at the same time that Bargnani was elected the best under-21 basketball talent in Europe. Gallinari, better known for being the son of the Vittorio Gallinari, who shared a room in Serie A with Knicks Coach Mike D’Antoni, was thought to be a valuable future player though not a first-round pick in the N.B.A. draft. At that time, for the young “Gallo” the word N.B.A. was just a dream.

On many Sunday mornings, he was jumping on a bus for up to seven hours before reaching the opponent’s court. His routine was simple: get up early, take something to read on the road and sleep on the way back because at 8:30 the next morning, he had to be in school.

At that time, Belinelli was probably more successful than his two Italian colleagues in the N.B.A. He grew up in Bologna, the capital of Italian basketball. In 2005 at 19 years old, he won the Italian championship and became M.V.P. of the Italian “Supercoppa,” one of the major national trophies of the regular season. The previous season, his club, Fortitudo Bologna, had a disappointing playoffs with the former N.B.A. players Dominique Wilkins and David Rivers. With Belinelli, Fortitudo Bologna showed it was finally ready to compete in Italy and Europe.