I used Lr to stitch (but could have used PS), and used PS for the surgery. You will not see stitch lines, but you may find some legs have gone missing.

It's really easy. Point. Snap. Move and point. Snap. and so on. Camera needs to be on manual exposure and focus. For metering you find the part of the "pano to be" that has the brightest highlight and adjust your exposure to not blow it out. This will help when you blend the images later. If you use a lens that has considerable corner drop off (not vignetting), you may want to tag the image with the correct lens profile before merging.

Wow! Good catch! I must have looked at this image dozens of times and never saw that. You certainly have a career as a Creative Director in a high-end advertising firm.

Here is the young lad two years later after his limb was reattached!

As far as any difficulty involved in on-the-fly hand-held panos - it really doesn't matter if the camera is level or not. What does matter is that there is enough overlap for the stitching program to find and blend boundaries. What got me on this shot was the barkeep's expression, and frankly it was my first shot. I decided that a wider view would put a bit more context into it so I took two more shots and stitched them.

If you are not familiar with pano stitching, especially on the fly and hand held, then I'd say you might want to give it a try. Taking several pictures to cover a scene takes only a few more seconds than it takes to do it with a single take with a wide lens. Besides I have traveled to many places, urban and natural and often prefer to shoot wide views as a pano rather than switch lenses.

You may want to learn how to do panos before you criticize someone for suggesting it. You can try this if you have a cellphone, which generally have pano capability or you can download a pano app. It is a perfectly valid way to minimize your gear and get better shots. Try and keep an open mind.

Here are a few panos I did, on the fly, no tripod, while traveling in Dublin, Ireland, during a Jameson Distillery tour and afterwards. These were all shot with a 45mm/D800, the only lens I had with me at the time. The Jameson bottle Christmas tree was a double row pano. I suspect traveling in Italy offers similar photo ops and the technique could be used there as well.

Does this answer the question of why I bothered to bring it up? I am not sure why you would make the statement, "I doubt it is any good for the OP's trip", or bother to criticize me for bringing it up. I suspect it because you have difficulty with panorama stitching. The OP has plenty of time to decide if this will be a viable approach for him before his trip.