Tromba marina: the instrument that gave Pepys a real buzz

Immortalised in Samuel Pepys’s diaries, strangely favoured by nuns, but today a curiosity – meet the mysterious and magical tromba marinaOn 24 October 1667, Samuel Pepys, arriving in Charing Cross too late for the theatre, went instead to visit some friends. There he saw “a Frenchman, Monsieur Prin, play on the Trump Marine”, an instrument which “doth so far out-do a Trumpet” and is “most remarkable; and at first was a mystery to me that I should hear a