An instrument built for two

Now this one is strange, very very strange. I'm still trying to wrap my mind around the tromba marina, that huge horn-like thing that turns out to be a massive, elongated, rectangular violin. This must be an overgrown hurdy-gurdy, but in this case it's so huge that it has to be operated (surely not played) by two. The effect is oddly electrified, like a modern rock guitar, and I can imagine Jimi Hendrix's version of The Star-Spangled Banner played on this, though the elderly European-looking musicians probably wouldn't know it.

So what would you do with this to transport it, to get it from place to place: a flatbed truck? How would you protect it from the elements (because it looks like one of those outdoor instruments)? Throw a tarp over it? Shrink-wrap it? The questions never end.

I like to think the instruments we have today have grandparents, and great-grandparents, and so on and so on. The crumhorn somehow turned into a sort of oboe, the rackett into - well, perhaps the modern-day fire extinguisher, and then - there's this.

Maybe it's like the dinosaurs, or the ancient period of "megafauna" when huge mammals ruled the earth, giant sloths and beavers the size of an apartment complex. Maybe over the centuries, things slowly shrank to a more manageable level. Or maybe this thing is just a wild card, predating the electric guitar by at least a millenium.