Loano, Italy

You should title your post "Loano, Italy" as Italy is too generic.
Loano is in the province of Savona. My only experience is driving through it on the freeway. There is a rail line there (the Genoa-Ventimiglia) and a station.
Whether you want a car or not depends on what you want to visit. If you just intend to stay in town and visit maybe the Cinque Terre, Portofino, Genoa, Sanremo and or some other Riviera towns (in Italy or France), you probably can do with the train only. If you like to venture onto the Ligurian Alps, then a car would be helpful.
To go to the Cinque Terre, you take a train from Loano. In most cases you will need to change trains in Genoa. On the opposite direction you can visit Sanremo, a nice town. To go to France, you will need to change trains in Ventimiglia. That rail line is not fast, and in several sections has only one track, therefore speeds are everything but stratospheric (actually locals say that the bikers on the Milano-Sanremo bicycle race are faster than their trains).

Thank you very much for your helpful information. You're absolutely right, Italy is a very broad topic. Thanks again.

June: it's not too late to re-title this post. To do this, make sure you're logged in, then select "Edit" at the bottom of the first post in this thread. You'll see that, in addition to changing the text in the post, you can change the title. As Roberto says, you should do so, so you can get more responses.

Thank you. I have retitled my query and now I may get the information I am asking for.

Looks like you got a very detailed response above. We don't have anything to add since it's not a place we research.