  (Abriged) We report on the measurement of the rest frame K-band luminosity
and total stellar mass of the hosts of 89 broad line Active Galactic Nuclei
detected in the zCOSMOS survey in the redshift range 1<z<2.2. The unprecedented
multiwavelength coverage of the survey field allows us to disentangle the
emission of the host galaxy from that of the nuclear black hole in their
Spectral Energy Distributions. We derive an estimate of black hole masses
through the analysis of the broad Mg II emission lines observed in the
medium-resolution spectra taken with VIMOS/VLT as part of the zCOSMOS project.
We found that, as compared to the local value, the average black hole to host
galaxy mass ratio appears to evolve positively with redshift, with a best fit
evolution of the form (1+z)^{0.68 \pm0.12 +0.6 -0.3}, where the large
asymmetric systematic errors stem from the uncertainties in the choice of IMF,
in the calibration of the virial relation used to estimate BH masses and in the
mean QSO SED adopted. A thorough analysis of observational biases induced by
intrinsic scatter in the scaling relations reinforces the conclusion that an
evolution of the MBH-M* relation must ensue for actively growing black holes at
early times: either its overall normalization, or its intrinsic scatter (or
both) appear to increase with redshift. This can be interpreted as signature of
either a more rapid growth of supermassive black holes at high redshift, a
change of structural properties of AGN hosts at earlier times, or a significant
mismatch between the typical growth times of nuclear black holes and host
galaxies.
