Hero is a word-word, the kind we all too often use to wipe our mouths and dust our consciences with in our times.
An appellation that in antiquity was reserved for demigods who were almost always called upon to perform immense epic feats (not that they weren't brought to it, like Heracles for example, hard to imagine employed in a feta company, or Jason, a skilled worker in a leather goods factory).

A word that literature during Romanticism sublimated to define those who suffered from man's greedy, violent and foolish nature, pining and often committing suicide (today, the social and media people who live on it would call the young Werther and Jacopo Ortis rather than heroes, assholes) and that in times of wars and revolutions it has become the Oscar of armies and their commanders or comprimarios, from Garibaldi of the two worlds to Sergeant York, the emblem of the Americans who celebrate heroes who single-handedly kill more than twenty enemies in war.

Today, 'hero' is a title that costs nothing to affix to anyone: the fireman who pulls his grandmother from the flames on the fifth floor is a hero, the overweight fifty-year-old father who drowns in the sea due to a heart attack after saving his son who had gone too far swimming. It matters little if the fireman did his duty and after that action asked for 60 days off for the burns and stress he suffered, and if the parent on the beach had been distracted by watching crap on his mobile phone and had lost sight of his son.

Perhaps it is because of this degeneration of the concept of heroism that the entertainment industry invented 'superheroes', who sort things out a bit: leave it to them, if you save a kitten meowing on the roof, you're a guy with nothing to do and at best you earn the esteem of a dishevelled 60-year-old spinster who then asks you for other favours in the name of her 75 puppies, for the most important celebrations, on the other hand, you'll never be there to receive the honours, and you won't end up in an eternal epic book.
Instead, there will be your wife crying at the funeral and a nice article in the provincial newspaper that will also mispronounce your surname.

In Africa, the hero returns to being a fable, a rhetorical figure, a dream.
In extreme cases, he returns to the original meaning of the term: 'one who, in the face of danger, fights adversity through feats of ingenuity, courage or physical strength that may involve the conscious sacrifice of self, in order to protect the good of others or the common good'.
What greater danger is there than not being able to bring home a meal for oneself and one's loved ones at the end of the day?
Then strike iron harder and faster, blacksmith, make a nicer bed and sofa, carpenter, break your back more, coal-digger who didn't get a chance to go to school.
You look after children and the grandson of your daughter who was raped at the age of 13, and at the same time you cultivate your garden, collect wood, carry 50 litres of water a day, woman.
Every day thousands of small, unknowing, unsung heroes move and perform actions so ordinary that nowadays they become extraordinary.

In a world where education, culture, and education are relegated to the gutter of necessities that help one to fulfil oneself and live better, for example, to see children who every day face ten kilometres on foot to go and another ten to return from school, in the hope of changing their lives and those of their families, is to see acts of heroism.
What can a peer from the Italian provinces think of them, other than 'poor children'?
Surely he will never think 'luckily I don't have to be a hero' and, more likely, will think that being a hero is a big mistake.