Suggestion for Italian beach town for 4-5 night w/o a car?

How about flying into Ancona and staying in Senigallia (train) or Sirolo/Numana (bus/taxi)?
I assume you can fly to most Italian airports out of Heathrow, but you might want to share some of the options you have ruled out and which airports you prefer.

Why did Viareggio not work out? There is a wide area of beach towns of different flavors - Lerici area or Sestri Levante
- and Pisa is a good airport for access from London and well connected by train. These areas are also well connected so if you do want a day trip to another town to explore that's easy as well.

Although if you're looking for really "beachy" weather in May you should probably be looking farther south since May weather is just starting to warm up in May.

Have a great trip,
=Tod

The water's gonna be...brisk most places, but you may be more interested. just in the beach/sun.

Wildcard suggestion; Fly LHR- Split, Croatia and take the ferry to one of the Croatian Islands

Santa Margherita Ligure, train from Pisa or Genoa airports. Great town but the beach area is limited, but previous post is right May is beach iffy.

Mondello (Palermo)

Weather in May may not be necessarily beach weather but it will be more likely so in Sicily than in more northern regions. Mondello is a borough of the city of Palermo which was developed in the early 1900s as an upscale area for the Palermitan upper middle class. Being attached to the rest of the city it cannot be defined as a small town, but it has the advantage of being only 30 minutes away from Palermo’s city center in case you are looking for stuff to do in case the weather is iffy. Also Palermo is a good hub to visit other more properly defined towns, such as Cefalù or Castellammare. I haven’t checked about flights to Palermo from London in May (many flights might be seasonal) but take a look.

Or you could fly into Bari or Brindisi (both served by BA from London) and stay at one of the coastal towns of Puglia.

Edit: only the flights to Brindisi are from Heathrow, but that is OK as it is further south, closer to the nicer beaches. However, service does not start until 18 May.

along the Adriatic side you can find plenty of beach towns reachable by rail or bus. You could fly into Rimini on the northern end, we liked Pesaro which has a nice pedestrian-only core, a wide grassy strip above the beach, and good restaurants. I've read good things also about Riccione near Rimini.

In Puglia you could fly into Brindisi or Bari as mentioned by Lola, plenty of beach towns there.

From LHR you can only fly non stop to the following Italian cities near the coast:
Rome
Venice
Naples
Pisa
Palermo (seasonal)
Brindisi (seasonal)

To me the best options, besides Palermo's area, would be Naples area (Sorrento Peninsula/Amalfi or the islands are nice and not as crowded in May as they are at other times of the summer).

Brindisi is also ok, although many of the nice beach towns in Puglia require some travel from Brindisi, and without a car, it would be more challenging to reach since Puglia is big and public transport less ideal.

Thank you all! Great suggestions. Going to explore some of them now- Naples & Palermo seem easy trips to plan so will start with those. Any recs on boutique hotels/ resorts in any of these places that you've been to & loved? Budget- $350/ night. Croatia sounds good too so keeping my options open for now!

What week in May? In late May, water should be brisk but weather will be conducive. This goes for Italy as well as Croatia. Croatia's beaches are mostly pebble/rock, but the seas are marvelous and it's a snap without a car.
One thing about Naples though, the Amalfi Coast is one you need to book well in advance, so maybe scope out accommodations before booking a flight. South of Salerno, the Cilento coast is more difficult without a car, but we had a short trip there without one and it was fine (for two avid walkers).

The Ligurian coast is also nice (small pebbly beaches) and not far from the Pisa airport. However the 5 Cinque Terre towns are packed already in May, and the only one with what one could call a beach is Monterosso. If too crowded for you tastes, you could consider some town further west from Monterosso, between Monterosso and Genoa. I like Bonassola, Moneglia, and Sestri Levante. The Genoa airport would be closer in that case, but unless they start this year, I don't think there are direct flights from LHR.

Although I have not been to the Texas coast, I suspect that Texas tends to have better beaches (hurricanes aside) than Italy. Have you ruled out the Amalfi Coast (perhaps because the beaches are tiny and tend to be pebbled), or Sorrento (where you could stay in a five or more luxury CLIFFSIDE hotels that have private gulf bathing boardwalks reached by the hotel's elevator, as well as a pool deck off a lobby floor?

Note that Sorrento is built on a cliff and cannot be considered a "beach town." But it has dozens of restaurants, and very good public transit connections for daytrips to Capri, Pompeii, and so on.

In the last week of May, we desperately needed the icy air conditioning of the Hotel Ambasciatori Grande in Sorrento.

The local commuter train from Naples is not suitable for the average Lincoln Navigator owner, so you might ask the hotel to send a car from their land-services partner. After taking the Circumvesuviana TO Sorrento, it was easy to spend 100 Euros to go back to the Naples train station (airport in your case.)