  Large ring-laser gyroscopes are capable of measuring angular rotations with a
precision well below fractions of $prad/s$, not far from $10^{-14}$ $rad/s$,
the accuracy required for General Relativity tests, this is what the GINGER
(Gyroscope-IN-GEneral-Relativity) experiment is aiming for. These features do
not guarantee the possibility of measuring the General Relativity
Lense--Thirring effect, that manifests itself as a tiny ($\approx 10^{-9}
\times \Omega_E$) perturbation of the Earth rotation rate. An underground
location being in principle less affected by external local disturbances
represents a good candidate for housing such a challenging experiment.
GINGERino is a test apparatus to investigate the residual local disturbances in
the most inner part of the underground international laboratory of the
GranSasso (LNGS). It consists of a square ring laser with a $3.6$ m side. The
instrument has been tailored to be the larger allowed by the particular
location inside the laboratory. Its main objective is to measure the very low
frequency rotational motions, in order to prove that LNGS is a suitable
location for very low noise measurements and, possibly, General Relativity
tests. Aside this main goal, GINGERino will provide unique data for geodesy and
geophysics. Its installation has been completed during 2015. Since then,
several long set of data have been collected, and the apparatus has been
continuously running unattended for more than one week. The typical power
spectrum sensitivity was a few $ 10^{-10} rad/s/\sqrt(Hz)$, with integration
time not longer than tens of seconds. Improvements of the apparatus are ongoing
in order to improve the integration time.
