  The very high spatial resolution provided by Adaptive Optics assisted
spectroscopic observations at 8m-class telescopes (e.g. with SINFONI at the
VLT) will allow to greatly increase the number of direct black hole (BH) mass
measurements which is currently very small. This is a fundamental step to
investigate the tight link between galaxy evolution and BH growth, revealed by
the existing scaling relations between $M_{BH}$ and galaxy structural
parameters. I present preliminary results from SINFONI K-band spectroscopic
observations of a sample of 5 objects with $M_{BH}$ measurements obtained with
the Reverberation Mapping (RM) technique. This technique is the starting point
to derive the so-called virial $M_{BH}$ estimates, currently the only way to
measure $M_{BH}$ at high redshift. Our goal is to assess the reliability of RM
by measuring $M_{BH}$ with both gas and stellar kinematical methods and to
investigate whether active galaxies follow the same $M_{BH}$-galaxy
correlations as normal ones.
