Italy is the second country after Germany to officially launch a bidding process that will cost less than in previous years after the International Olympic Committee agreed to shoulder part of the budget.
The prospect of paying for the event, which cost its last host city London roughly 9 billion pounds, was quickly met with opposition from some corners in a country heading for its third straight year of recession.
"Olympics 2024 in Rome? No thanks!" wrote the consumers' association ADUC in an open letter to the premier, rejecting the idea of spending money on a sporting event while Italians were being asked to make sacrifices.
Two years ago, then-prime minister Mario Monti pulled Rome out of the 2020 Games campaign in mid-race, saying the effort would jeopardise austerity measures taken in an attempt to balance its budget and head off a debt crisis.
"All too often, Italy seems resigned," Renzi said at an event in the Italian capital to launch the bid. "You can lose, but what isn't acceptable is not to try to win," he said.
This time around, Italy's ability to manage the sort of big events that it hopes will help revive the stagnant economy has been called into question by several criminal investigations.
Italy has struggled for decades against rampant corruption. The discovery in Rome this month of an underworld of bribery, extortion and rigged contracts follows the arrests in May of seven former lawmakers, managers and public officials suspected of trying to influence public tenders for the 2015 Milan Expo.
After the bid announcement, Italian journalist Leonardo Metalli tweeted: "This way we don't have to think about the mafia in Rome any more. Long live the Olympics! Don't steal the rings."
Rome, which hosted the summer Olympic Games in 1960, lost out to Athens in its bid to hold the 2004 event. The Greek capital ended up spending an estimated $14 billion on the Games, leaving it with state-of-the-art stadiums that now languish behind locked gates.
(Reporting by Isla Binnie; Editing by Tom Heneghan)
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